August 23, 1793

Levée en masse

The National Convention decrees the levée en masse

The decree set children to shredding old linen into hospital lint and ordered cellar floors washed so that saltpetre could be scraped out for gunpowder.

23 August 1793: eighteen articles of requisition

Bertrand Barère brought the text to the National Convention on 23 August 1793 in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, and the deputies adopted it. Its first article placed all French people in permanent requisition for the armies until the Republic's enemies had been expelled.

The eighteen articles sorted the population by role: combat for young men, war-support work for married men, women, children and the elderly. National buildings were to be converted into barracks, public places into arms workshops, horses requisitioned, and extraordinary arms production established.

The Convention put 50,000,000 livres in assignats at the war minister's disposal and ordered extraordinary couriers to carry the decree out to the departments.

Who was actually ordered to march

"All Frenchmen" did not mean every man became a combat soldier. The people ordered to march first were unmarried citizens and childless widowers aged 18 to 25 — the widowers are the half usually dropped from summaries.

They were to assemble without delay at their district capitals and drill daily while awaiting departure. The decree prohibited substitutes, so a man called up could not pay or nominate someone to go in his place.

The parliamentary record consulted names Barère, not Lazare Carnot, as the deputy who proposed the decree, though Carnot is closely associated with revolutionary military mobilization.

An emergency levy, not a conscription system

This was a one-off emergency requisition rather than the recurring conscription machinery France later ran. That arrived in 1798 with the Jourdan-Delbrel law, which declared every Frenchman a soldier owing himself to the defense of the nation.

Army totals from this period should be handled carefully. The levy eventually added about 300,000 men and helped bring strength to roughly 800,000, but paper totals, men actually present and effective fighting strength were three different numbers.

Whether 1793 should be called the beginning of modern total war is a historiographical argument, not a settled fact about that August day; scholars disagree about the concept and about earlier precedents.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

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