ABSTRACT
No one but the king has the right to raise troops. This principle, acknowledged since the reign of François I, was reaffirmed by Henri III in the ordinance of 26 December 1583. The latter may be considered the fundamental ‘recruitment charter’ of the ancien régime (Girard 1922: 14). Anybody who raised troops without explicit royal permission was to be treated as a rebel and a criminal (Briquet 1761: vol. 4, 282-3). The central power monopolized the means of violence and outlawed any attempt to create rival armed forces: in France the construction of a centralized state went hand in hand with the nationalization of the armed forces. Private armies and the personal possession of weapons gradually disappeared, to the advantage of the central power. The process of state construction, however, is not one-dimensional. Monarchies have to rely on particular social groups in order to enforce their power, and the consequent alliance of central state power and particular interest groups creates, in turn, a socially unstable equilibrium between contradictory forces. In the case of eighteenth-century France, recruitment was extremely complex since different and even conflicting practices coexisted over a long period. Three different stages of recruitment policy, however, can be distinguished: feudal recruitment, racolage (‘touting’), militia call-up and national recruitment. However, chronological boundaries between these stages were by no means clear and are distinguished here only for the sake of clarity.
