Citizens, soldiers and national armies : military service in France and Germany, 1789-1830
Thomas Hippler (Author)
"Compulsory military service implies a contradiction: conceived as an element and a guarantee of the citizens' active participation in politics, it is at the same time an institution of social discipline that separates the citizens from the civil society. This tension between citizenship and discipline thus poses concretely the problem of political liberty. While being egalitarian in its principle, conscription concerns only the male parts of the population. The exclusion of women echoes their exclusion from political rights. Moreover, the universality of the obligation is in constant tension with particular class interests." "Rather than opposing a French model of republican conscription to a Prussian militarism, this book tries to show how Prussia has replied dialectically to the revolutionary institution of mass violence. The French Revolution and the Prussian Reforms are thus conceived of as two moments within a single process which is intrinsically transnational. The book seeks to confront the philosophical problem of political liberty - as it was formulated most prominently by Rousseau and Kant - to history and relies on official sources, philosophical texts, as well as ego-documents, which are subjective articulations of political modernity."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2008
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, London, 2008
Military history
x, 260 pages ; 24 cm.
9780415409797, 0415409799
76967339
Introduction: citizenship and discipline
First part: the French moment
State-construction and recruitment policy in the ancien regime
From feudal recruitment to touting
The militia (and how to escape from it)
Soldiers and the state
The Enlightenment and military service
Virtue-politics
Rousseau and the military: a philosophy of civic practice
Citizen-soldiers
Popular arming and military service in the French Revolution
The formation of the National Guard
The 1789-90 debate on the "military constitution"
Armed forces and levies of volunteers in 1791-3
Citizenship or discipline?
Unifying the public force
The revolutionary state and the "nation in arms"
Quatre-vingt-treize
"Death is a reminder of equality": the self-creation of the people
Abstraction and identification
Military experiences
Constructing a popular state
Transition: technologies of the state from France to Prussia
Second part: the Prussian moment
Military, society, and the state in old regime Prussia
State-construction and military duties
The establishment of the canton system
Social implementation
Criticism of the Prussian military system
German idealism and military service
The challenge of revolutionary war to German culture
Interpreting the Revolution: the reform as theory
Kant's heroic humiliation
Fichte's inner frontier
Conscription in the reformed Prussian state
Empowering the nation
The principles of the military reform
Creating a body politic
Principles of stratification
The path to national war
National war and conscription
Organizing an insurrection
Constitution and terror
Popular arming
Conscription
Conclusion
Translated from the French