Abstract
On September 5, 1798, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan and Pierre Delbrel’s loi Jourdan-Delbrel brought universal conscription to France for the first time. It required men aged 20-25 to serve in the military regardless of what conflict, if any, was taking place. Replacing the revolutionary levée en masse, which contained a caveat limiting the enlistment to enlarging the army in response to foreign invasion, the loi Jourdan-Delbrel was an unprecedented intrusion of the power of the French state into rural lives. Far from passively accepting its decrees, as the Directory, the governing body of the French First Republic, had expected, however, French peasants pushed back through desertion, riots, evasion of penalties, and other forms of protest, confounding the Parisian authorities. This persistent resistance to the demands for obedience by the powerful empire represented a revolution in its own right.The inhabitants of the French countryside are less familiar to most historians than the rest of the Third Estate, due in large part to the impersonal nature of the surviving archival evidence: peasant social experiences are actually quite richly documented, but their voices are rarely directly recorded. It has therefore all too often been assumed that the peasantry was indifferent to, or even unaffected by, the policies of a state whose attention was primarily directed towards the urban proletariat. The French seigneurial system, under whose rules most peasants had lived, persisted in practice after 1789 under a different legal terminology and through slightly modernized methods of exploitation despite the abolition of feudalism that supposedly accompanied the demise of the Ancien Régime. Many historians have therefore presumed that the peasantry, insulated in the provinces, was much less affected by the fall of the Ancien Régime than other social classes. Those working in the Marxist tradition commonly argued that when it came to politics, peasants were concerned with little else besides their lands and their parish, but as Marx himself pointed out, that did not prevent the peasants from seeing an enemy in the local ruling class.
Against these views, the present thesis argues that through the Jourdan Law, the French state was now attempting to extend its reach much more deeply into rural households. The attendant disruption of peasant ways of life for the first time in a century, conscription generated an experience of disruption and inequity shared by the urban proletariat and rural peasantry in nearly the same way. This unintentional unification of the Third Estate allowed the laboring classes to work toward a common goal. My research suggests that during this time, peasant discontent burst out of their local communities and onto the national stage by resisting conscription, further diluting the power of the national ruling class after the urban revolutionary events had already weakened it. While it would be going too far to claim that the peasants had gained class consciousness through their experience of the Jourdan Law, they did nevertheless, stumble into a kind of class solidarity, unintentionally joining forces with the urban proletariat to subvert the power of the state. Through this research, we can further contextualize our understanding of how effective Napoleon’s conscription efforts were within the rural population, particularly within the southwest of France.
My research focuses on four communes within the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern France: Buzet-sur-Tarn, Montesquieu-Volvestre, Villeneuve-de-Rivière, and Montesquieu-Lauragais. These four communes were broadly representative of southern French agrarian communes and experienced high levels of conscription. They also have tax records, census records, and muster rolls, which have survived and been digitally archived.
My research is grounded in a thorough examination of the tax registers from these communes, cross-referencing them with both state census returns and the muster rolls from Napoleon’s military. Based on demographic data from the census, I calculated the approximate number of families residing in these towns. I also analyzed the tax rolls to determine how many of these families had sufficient property to be liable to pay taxes. After synthesizing this data, I was able to determine the percentage of conscripts who came from families too poor to appear on tax registers. This analysis then demonstrated the vital role the conscripted man played in his family and the agrarian society in which they lived. A comparison of outcomes between those conscripts who were wealthy enough to incur a tax obligation and those who were too poor helps to illustrate the actual cost of conscription by social class. This evidence helps explain why the poorest would combine forces to resist the state's efforts. Despite the sanctions threatened by the French state, deserters and draft evaders (insoumis), often found safe harbors in rural villages that opposed Napoléon’s authoritarian demands.
A final point that warranted investigation was the ultimate effectiveness of the state’s threats. Insoumis were sometimes tracked down, tried, and sentenced to punishments ranging from death to public labor, usually in the form of being forced to return to war, to a financial penalty of around 1,500 francs, a sum that no peasant could afford to pay over the course of a lifetime. Determining whether these sums were ever ultimately paid, whether the death sentences were actually carried out, and if so, what the long-term consequences may have been for the families of the soldiers is a secondary research point that demonstrates how the rural population's resistance subverted power and effectively supported the continued dissolution of the ancien regime by helping the resistance effort reach critical mass.
This research demonstrates the different ways rural southwest France disabled, circumvented, or otherwise subverted state authority through desertion, riots, and other civil disobedience. It exhibits the socio-economic status of the conscripts to illustrate why they would risk disobeying a powerful empire, and it follows the outcome of several case studies to show the strength of the resistance and the ineffectiveness of the state’s efforts to contain and discourage opposition.