ABSTRACT
French observers of the Russian army in the mid-nineteenth century found it both impressive and repugnant. The government of Louis-Philippe faced opposition from Bonapartists and Ultras as well as from republicans, all of whom looked to the armed forces for potential support. It was precisely such accumulation of judicial experience that was valued in France, where permanent courts martial had long been the rule. In France successive changes of regime severely tested the army's cohesion. In France a law of 1790 distinguished between delinquencies, which incurred disciplinary penalties, and offences, which might be punished either thus or by court martial. The Russian military-judicial system, noted another French officer who studied it closely, "rests basically on unconditional subordination to the will of one's superior and on an absolute disregard for the human dignity of all those not of noble extraction.".
