Daily Life During the French Revolution (40 page)

Other victories soon followed, leading to the conquest of
Belgium by General Dumouriez in the winter of 1792–93. In December, many
retired from the volunteer army, as they were entitled to do, despite appeals
to their patriotism from the government. On February 1, 1793, France declared
war on England, and again the military situation gradually reversed. On
February 21, another critical time for France, the regular army and the
volunteers were amalgamated. Their previous differences in recruitment,
promotion, pay scales, and uniforms were now all standardized into one armed
force.

MOBILIZATION

On August 23, 1793, the Convention ordered a
levée en
masse
of the entire French nation. The youth would go to battle, married
men would forge arms, and old men were to engage in repairing public buildings
and squares of the cities and inspire the young to bravery by preaching unity
of the republic and hatred for the monarchy. Women were to stitch tents and
uniforms and work in military hospitals, while children were expected to make
bandages. State workshops were set up to produce arms for nearly a million men.
Everything was subject to requisition, from gold to grain. Even church bells
were melted down into cannon. On June 26, 1794, in the decisive battle of
Fleurus, the army soundly defeated the Austrians, who were driven from French
soil. But there was trouble brewing on the home front: the Girondist citizens
of Lyon and other sections of the south overthrew their Jacobin authorities and
took up arms against the Convention.

REVOLUTIONARY ARMY

Organized for the most part in the fall of 1793 in Paris, a
new force evolved at the initiative of the popular societies, the most
influential of which were the Jacobin clubs. This revolutionary or people’s
army
(armées révolutionaires)
was not associated with the regular army
but consisted of militias formed from ordinary citizens, mostly sans-culottes,
to combat counterrevolutionary activities and grain hoarders as bread prices rose
and to enforce the policies of the Terror in the provinces. They scoured and
despoiled villages for hidden caches of wheat. The largest was the army of
Paris, which contained more than 6,000 men of sans-culotte extraction and a
mixture of civil servants and ex-soldiers. More than 50 such so-called armies
were organized in the provinces, but most numbered under 100 men. They were
paid a generous daily wage. Their mission was to enforce the Maximum (price
controls on wheat and flour), to supply the urban food markets with grain
(often requisitioned from hostile peasants), and to supply the military
commissaries of the regular army. Because of the policy of de-Christianization,
they also indulged in appropriating parish churches to use as stables and supply
depots and destroying the idols. As conflicts with peasants became more common
as the local inhabitants fought back to protect their crops and their Catholic
faith, the Montagnard leadership in the Convention decided that these people’s
armies were causing more trouble than they were worth. They were abolished in
December 1793.

A SOLDIER’S LIFE

There were, of course, some men who preferred the military
life, enjoying the glory of belonging to what they considered the finest army
in the world. Others found having generally regular meals and pay more
desirable than having to think for themselves as civilians, in spite of the
hard and, at times, dangerous life of a soldier.

Recruits spent a little time in the barracks (usually a
converted monastery or church) learning the basics of warfare before joining
their regiment. On the campaign trail, the soldier passed most of his time in
the open, sleeping in tents. Officers might find lodging in the house of a
wealthy bourgeois, where they ate well and often had company in bed.

The men almost never changed their clothes and often slept
on the same patch of ground for several months. Military life could be
extremely monotonous, more so perhaps for those who were illiterate, with the
boredom alleviated now and then by card games and gambling and, sometimes, by
the intense adrenaline rush of battle, which could result in tremendous
slaughter. Tactics of the time included massed musket fire and case shot with
cannon rounds at close range, followed by a bayonet charge. For many, the
trauma of killing or the threat of being killed changed their lives, and they
were never the same after having been in battle.

Long marches from one zone to another in all weather,
carrying a rifle, ball, powder, and other necessities such as water and biscuit
left soldiers exhausted, hardly able to put one foot ahead of the other; yet
rest was out of the question until the new camp was made secure and livable,
with pickets posted, latrines dug, and tents erected. Guard duty required the soldier
to stand or walk for many hours along the perimeter of the camp, sometimes in
freezing weather, blistering winds, or the unpleasant heat of the afternoon
sun, and was one of the most onerous duties. At night the sentries struggled
constantly between the need to be alert and the overwhelming desire to sleep.
Desertions were frequent.

When supplies were slow in arriving or did not come at all,
soldiers were often compelled to live off the land and eat whatever they could
find. The Convention passed a law in 1793 that included the death penalty for
soldiers found guilty of indiscriminate pillage and repeated desertion—a
penalty that was sometimes carried out by officers as an example to the rest of
the men. Usually, however, a blind eye was turned to pillage on long marches
when supplies lagged behind and the men were hungry.

Angry citizens sometimes complained to their mayor about
the behavior of soldiers camped in the vicinity or in the villages, where
drunkenness and attacks on peasants were rampant while the soldiers were
stealing food. Theft and even rape were all too often considered by soldiers to
be part of their unofficial wages.

Efforts to supply the army were not wanting. From 1793 on,
with the nation under arms, the French people were nearly permanently in a
state of requisition. The wealthy were forced to loan money to the government,
bells were taken from the churches, and the peasants had to provide horses,
mules, and donkeys. Everything was nationalized. In Paris, workshops hammered
out bullets and rifles and cast cannons. People were told to search in their
cellars and outhouses for saltpeter, which was needed to make gunpowder.

Behind every regiment stretched a lengthy line of women.
Some were washerwomen, some provided food and drink for the soldier with a few coins
in his pocket to pay for them, some were wives who on occasion gave birth along
the route, and others were prostitutes, whose numbers swelled when the pay
arrived. Most women did not shun battle, and they were there in the heat of the
fight, giving a sip of brandy here or an encouraging word there. They, too,
lived a difficult and precarious existence.

WOMEN IN THE MILITARY

Some women were determined to do what was then considered a
man’s job, and at least 40 women and perhaps many more donned the uniform and
went off to fight in the army. When some soldiers were identified as women, a
decree of April 30, 1793, ordered all women home from the ranks. This order was
widely ignored, and some women managed to continue without being found out.
Some were praised for their bravery even after they were identified, and one
fought on even when her husband perished in the battle beside her. Citizenness
Favre was captured by the enemy and taken to the rear, where prisoners were
slaughtered by sword cuts to save gunpowder. When her turn came, her clothes
were ripped off, and she was revealed as a woman. Fortunately for her, the
captain commanding the unit of Prussian light cavalry rescued her from his men.
Later, back in France, she appeared before the Convention to complain on behalf
of the army about poor equipment, a lack of arms and boots, and the
incompetence of the high command. Her criticisms were similar to those of other
soldiers, who were not in a position to voice their views.

MEDICAL SERVICES

With France at war with most of Europe and employing huge
conscript armies to defend its revolution, French soldiers fought bloody
battles and suffered enormous casualties. Young men had a good chance of being
killed, severely maimed, or dying of infected wounds. Disease was a constant
threat to men living in close quarters. Without good knowledge of medical
treatment, physicians employed drugs in combination, often in excessive
amounts, and resorted to harmful procedures such as bleeding, purging, and
sweating to treat fever.

Medical provisions were always in short supply, and troops
could expect nothing more than the most elementary care for wounds and
illnesses and nothing at all for traumatic mental disorders. Proper hospitals,
antiseptics, and anesthetics were then not available, and there was only
alcohol to help lessen the pain. Every regiment had a surgeon with a few
assistants, and the usual treatment for a severe leg or arm wound was
amputation before gangrene set in.

Much of the French military medical service had fallen on
hard times during the revolution; although a number of military hospitals had
been built on the northern frontier during the old regime, many were no longer usable.
Those that were usable were not sufficient for the large number of casualties,
and nearby homes were often commandeered to billet the patients.

On November 19, 1793, on a visit to Strasbourg, Saint-Just
was appalled by the terrible conditions in the hospitals there. He ordered the
municipality to find 2,000 more beds in the next 24 hours, and they were
rounded up from wealthy households.

The medical command was divided between a
physician-in-chief, Jean-François Coste, and a surgeon-in-chief,
Pierre-François Percy. Both were career medical officers. Surgeons treated
wounds by incising them and feeling around with their fingers for the musket
ball or shell fragments, which they pulled out; they then sewed the patient
back up. As with other wars, it was not the wounds that took the greatest toll;
it was the ensuing infection.

Coste and his colleagues tried, with little success, to
follow the teaching of John Pringle and others on camp diseases and hospital
sanitation. No surgery was done on the battlefield. Sick and lightly wounded
soldiers were simply left there to fend as best they could until the fighting
was over, at which time they could be collected and evacuated. This might mean
a wait of three or four days. The more seriously wounded were taken by their
fellows to a collection point, where they remained until they were loaded into
large, cumbersome wagons that were the only ambulances available. There were
never enough of these wagons, and they were usually kept far from the battle
zone. The men would then be transported to a military hospital behind the
lines, often a full day’s journey of three or four miles. The miserable,
jarring passage was often fatal for the gravely wounded, who ended up at the
cemetery instead of the hospital.

The evacuation process resulted in the loss of many strong,
healthy men, since it required about six soldiers to carry one injured man, his
weapon, and his equipment from the battlefield. The wounded might be taken on
an improvised litter made of guns, branches, or coats or by farmers’ carts
pressed into service.

Percy, the chief surgeon, attempted to address the problem
by organizing litter bearers to work on the battlefield to bring in the
wounded. Because of the misery he observed, Percy was eager to get the men out
as quickly as possible. In 1792, he wrote:

In
retreat before the enemy there is no more frightful a spectacle than the
evacuation of mutilated soldiers on big wagons; each jolt brings the most
piercing cries. They have to suffer from rain, from suffocating heat or
freezing cold and often do not have aid of food of any sort. Death would be a
favor and we have often heard them begging it as a gift from heaven.

It was another French surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, who
actually developed a system of rapid evacuation. Larrey joined the French army
in 1792 and served in northern France. Recognizing the need to get wounded
soldiers off the fields of battle as soon as possible, as well as to be able to
conduct some treatment on the battlefield itself, he developed several new
types of horse-drawn carriages, which he called “flying ambulances,” that were
constructed especially for wounded men.

Delayed amputation had been the rule, but military surgeons
noted that the wounded bled more and had a great deal more pain as their
muscles became rigid, making amputation more difficult. Gangrene, sepsis, and
death were more common in patients who were evacuated to the rear with
untreated wounds. Larrey noted that soon after being wounded, when a patient
was in neurogenic shock, the bleeding was not as great, the muscles were more
relaxed, the limb was numb from bruised nerves, and the pain of amputation and
the agony of the saw were much reduced. In addition, he realized that if the
injury was cleaned and surgically dressed, evacuation would be more comfortable
and infection less likely.