| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, editors. The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 268. $65.00.

Based on papers give at the Seminar on Force in History held at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, this valuable collection takes the levée en masse of the French Revolution and uses its influence and memorialization to consider the notion of popular engagement with war from then until the present, in a series of studies that considers aspects of the position in Algeria, China, France, Germany, the United States, and Vietnam. Editor Daniel Moran, in his comprehensive introduction, suggests that the levée en masse in all its forms is distinguished by the scale of its claims on society and by the linkages among citizenship, military service, political authority, and the transforming social action employed to legitimize these claims. He argues that, although the legend of the levée en masse has lost its grip on the Western imagination, it remains important for much of the rest of the world. Although Moran does not mention it, the legend also still echoes in the romantic corners of the Western imagination, feeding left-wing fantasies about popular warfare and their right-wing counterparts about a new civic militarism. Alan Forrest considers the first levée en masse, noting that, with the passage of time, the revolutionary armies lost much of their ideological commitment, but arguing that it was the boldness of the patriotic vision of August 1793, not just the tactical proficiency of the army it engendered, that explains the power of the myth and its durability. Owen Connelly assesses the historiography of the levée en masse, pointing out that most "leftist historians" (p. 48) have supported the myth while opposing conscription in their own time.

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