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Levée en masse (literally "Mass uprising") is a French term for mass conscription.
Origins
In the polis envisioned in Plato's Laws, the militia would include the entire population, and women and children would drill alongside men.
Under Alfred the Great, the Wessex fyrd was divided in two, with half the farmers staying home to tend their crops, and the other half levied to serve in the army, then rotating back to the village.
In feudal times, peasant levies were often used to supplement levies of men-at-arms, usually as sappers, pioneers, woodcutters etc., and not as fighting men. Some jurisdictions, like France, developed the institution of corvée, whereby laborers were conscripted annually by their seigneur for either military or non-military duties.
None of these, however, were on the same scale that was to be realized for the first time in Europe during the French Revolution.
The levée in China
Until the French Revolution warfare in China was waged on an entirely different scale to that in Europe. During the 15th Century France and England maintained standing armies of less than 50,000. By contrast Ming dynasty China maintained a peace time standing army of about 1.8 or 1.9 million.
Of course this is largely due to the much larger population of China, but the kingdom of Qin in the Warring States period and the Taiping Tianguo stand as examples of the levée en masse in China prior to the 20th Century.
The legalist state
The first real manifestation of the levée en masse in human history was actually a long way from France where the term was first coined two thousand years later.During the Warring States period of Chinese history a number of different philosophical schools contended. The four main schools were Confucianism, Daoism, Moism and, importantly to this topic, Legalism. The Legalist philosophy proposed strict laws with rigidly enforced punishments and rewards given in accordance with these laws and a system of meritocracy. However the Legalists also believed that the most important aspect of governance was to make the state strong. This naturally meant creating a strong army.
The most prominent Legalist was Gongsun Yang, the Lord of Shang, who was prime minister of Qin from 361 to BCE. Gongsun Yang believed that if the entire state's citizenry could be divided between agriculture and the military the state would be invincible. The goal was to turn the nation into little more than a weapon - every citizen would do his or her bit to support the military. The Legalist system of rigid laws and autocratic, authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorship was an important aspect of this.
Every resource of the Qin state was mobilized in its efforts to subdue its neighbours and unify China. This it accomplished in 221 BCE after 9 years of constant warfare. At its height the Qin army reached about 2,000,000 strong - out of a total population of less than 20 million. Before it began to conquer its neighbours it maintained a standing army of almost a million from a population of just 5 million. This is probably the highest ratio of enlisted personnel to total population in human history and is certainly an accurate example of the levée en masse in action. Of course considering the notorious unreliability of ancient sources these figures are probably exaggerated (as were Herodotus' claims that the Persian army of Xerxes numbered 2.6 million in its invasion of Greece). The actual figures could be only a third of those given, but even these reveal warfare on a massive scale.
Later Chinese military
Although throughout much of Chinese history an army of over a million men has been maintained by the Empire, the Qin state remained unrivalled in its efficiency. Post-Qin dynasties such as the Han and the Tang, both with a population of 60 million, also have standing armies of 1 million men. It is interesting that although overall population rose throughout the Chinese dynasties, the size of its standing army remained mostly the same.Taiping Tianguo
However total war resumed in China in the mid-nineteenth century when Hong Xiuquan (1812-1864) created the Taiping Tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace) in 1850. This separatist state was founded by Hong's cult of Christian fanatics, all of which received military training. In essence every citizen of the Taiping Tianguo was a soldier and even children received rudimentary martial training in preparation for future service in the Taiping armies. Women were treated no differently to men and the numbers of both genders in the ranks did not vary dramatically.At its height in the early 1860s the Taiping army numbered a little under 2 million. The Imperial armies during the war with the Taipings were even larger still - numbering well over 2 million men, although this taken from a much larger population than that of the Taiping Kingdom.
The levy in Poland (Pospolite ruszenie)
In Poland, the levying of gentry and peasantry together became known as pospolite ruszenie. Non-Polish historians often use the anachronistic French term levée en masse to denote the institution.
The modern levée
The French Revolutionary Wars
The modern levée en masse was born in the French Revolutionary Wars. Under the Ancien Regime there had been some conscription (by ballot) to a militia milice to supplement the large standing army in times of war. This had been unpopular with the peasant communities on which it fell, and one of their grievances which they expected to be addressed by the French States-General when these were convened in 1789 to put the French monarchy on a sounder footing. When things turned out rather differently (see French Revolution), the milice was duly abolished by the National Assembly.As the Revolution progressed, external enemies appeared prepared to invade France to restore the status quo. They were resisted by a mixture of what remained of the old professional army and volunteers (it was these, not the levee en masse that won the battle of Valmy and saved the Revolution). By March 1793 France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Spain, Britain, Piedmont and the United Provinces: it was recognised that volunteering could no longer be relied upon, and the National Convention called upon each French départements to supply a quota of recruits (totaling about 300,000); with the means of selection unspecified. By some accounts, only about half this number appears to have been actually raised, bringing the army strength up to about 645,000 in mid-1793 and the military situation continued to worsen (not helped by internal difficulties such as the revolt in the Vendée which were in part triggered by this re-introduction of conscription).
In response to this, a levée en masse was decreed by the National Convention on 23 August, 1793 in ringing terms, beginning:
"From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn linen into lint; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic"
All unmarried able-bodied men between 18 and 25 were requisitioned with immediate effect for military service. This significantly increased the number of men in the army, reaching a peak of about 1,500,000 in September 1794, although the actual fighting strength probably peaked at no more than 800,000. In addition, as the decree suggests, much of the civilian population was turned towards supporting the armies through armaments production and other war industries as well as supplying food and provisions to the front. For all the rhetoric, the levée en masse was not popular; desertion and evasion were high. But the effort was sufficient to turn the tide of the war, and there was no need for any further conscription until 1797, when a more systematic system of annual intake was instituted.
Though not a novel idea—cf. thinkers as diverse as Plato, above and the lawyer and linguist Sir William Jones (who thought every adult male should be armed with a musket at public expense)—the actual practice of a levée en masse was rare before the French Revolution. The French levée was a key development in modern warfare and would lead to steadily larger armies with each successive war - culminating in the enormous bloodbaths of World Wars One and Two during the first half of the 20th century. But it was the Prussians in the wake of their defeat by Napoleon who made the crucial improvement of systematic short-term peace-time conscription to create large numbers of trained men who could be mobilised on the outbreak of war. Unfortunately, the advantage this gave to the first to mobilise did nothing to make war less likely.
World Wars in the Twentieth Century
By the time of the First and Second World Wars armies of Great Powers were generally well in excess of a million men with some soaring beyond 10 million. Between 1941-45 a total of 29 million Soviets served in the Red Army. Of these 1.5 million were professional soldiers, 4 million were volunteers and the remainder were conscripted through the levée en masse. This was the largest army ever mobilized and revealed the full potential of the levée en masse, dwarfing even the armies of the First World War in size.The modern levée Since 1945
Since World War II instances of levée en masse have been scarce with more limited forms of conscription favoured for the smaller, geographically confined conflicts of the Cold War era. The Korean War and the Iran-Iraq War serve as post-WWII instances of levée en masse.In addition several nations today maintain sizeable reserve forces. The Russian Federation has 20 million trained reserves at the ready in the instance of an outbreak of hostilities with a major power. Austria can mobilize to around a million troops within 48 hours of the order being given in a time of war. Vietnam maintains 3.8 million reserves and both North and South Korea have over 4.5 million reserves. Taiwan keeps over a million reserves at the ready in case of invasion from the mainland. A number of other nations have large reserve forces in excess of a million (including the United States of America and the People's Republic of China, both of which have around 1.5 million reserves).
"Levée en masse"