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IsserWoloch “A Sacred Debt”: Veterans and the State in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France War veterans as a group straddle civil and military society. True, they can be studied strictly within the context of the military profession, as André Corvisier did in his book on the eighteenth-century French soldier and the career of soldiering. But most elderly or disabled veterans at that time, and certainly during the revolutionary-Napoleonic era, found themselves upon demobilization in the lower reaches of civil society.1 Since needy veterans formed a particular stratum of the poor, veterans policy (while also an element of the state’s military structure) was likely to be a frontier of social welfare, dependent in turn on the nature of the regime and its ideology. Between 1789 and 1815, France experienced a dizzying succession of such regimes—constitutional monarchy until 1792; Jacobin republic between 1792 and 1794; moderate republic during the Thermidorian reaction and the Directory, 1794–99; Bonaparte’s Consulate between 1800 and 1804, followed by the Napoleonic empire after that date—while embroiled in an almost continuous and ever-expanding war between 1792 and 1815. During the French Revolution, as we shall see, veterans policy brie›y entered a totally uncharted territory of egalitarian liberality. Ultimately, however, the revolutionary and Napoleonic state failed to sustain this remarkable policy, as provisions for war veterans receded in disarray and slipped back to more traditional and inadequate levels. In this paper I will sketch the unprecedented mutations in France’s provision for veterans; the implementation of these new policies that paralleled oscillations in the Revolution’s character; and the subsequent derogations, retreats, and failures. I A century before the French Revolution, the precociously centralized and militarized state of Louis XIV adopted at least some aged and disabled ex145 soldiers and of‹cers as favored wards. Whereas poor relief generally remained a local matter, religious or municipal in nature, Louis XIV created an impressive state institution, the Hôtel Royal des Invalides, to serve this needy constituency. The National Assembly of 1789 inherited that venerable establishment, along with other provisions for veterans, striking both for their unusual scope compared to the rest of Europe and for their blatant de‹ciencies. While providing some form of assistance to as many as 35,000 former of‹cers and soldiers, these bene‹ts were riddled with inequities and the spoils of aristocratic privilege. War ministry reformers had long advocated uniform and standardized retirement pensions that would encourage and reward longevity, and in the 1760s Choiseul’s government had created the rudiments for such a system when it offered annual pensions to privates and NCOs who could not be accommodated at the Hôtel des Invalides after the heavy casualties and demobilizations of the Seven Years War: 54 livres (solde) for a private after 24 years of service, for example, or 27 livres (demisolde ) annually after at least 16 years. Choiseul likewise sought to create a standardized scale of retirement pensions for of‹cers with at least 30 years of service, starting at 360 livres for lieutenants, and 500 to 700 for captains, with increments for further longevity. Most money paid out in royal pensions, however, was not being allocated under any such rationalized criteria, and when the National Assembly managed to secure the royal pension list for 1789, the contours of an abusive spoils system unfolded. Of approximately 24,000 individuals receiving royal pensions (about half being military of‹cers), over half drew amounts less than 600 livres, but these individuals accounted for only 14 percent of the money. At the other end of the spectrum a mere 90 individuals accounted for 9 percent of the money. As Baron de Wimpffen, an in›uential member of the National Assembly and himself the recipient of an 8,000livre pension, noted in 1789, “under the same title of Pension are confounded the feeble compensation for a long career of privations, dangers, and suffering and the recompense that pride accords to baseness.”2 The net balance of the pension list’s two functions—providing bene‹ts for retired or disabled of‹cers, and dispensing royal largesse to favorites— was drawn by Wimpffen’s military committee. Military pension obligations totaled 6,162,000 livres for around 10,000 of‹cers, and 9,772,000 livres for 857 generals (many of them high aristocrats still on active duty). And this disproportion was merely the most striking part of a system that limited the resources available to the neediest veterans of...

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