请将“The standing army was supposed to consist in the main of volunteers. Compulsory enlistment was actually forbidden in 1692, at least in formal terms. Contracts were then made for a term of eight years. During the service period and for one year after, soldiers were exempt from the taille, which, on the one hand, put them in a similar position to the nobility, while, on the other, it spared the crown money on their payment. Sometimes, though less commonly than was formerly supposed, prisoners were pardoned if they were prepared to join the army; former galley slaves, however, who had been branded, were not accepted in the army, though vagabonds frequently were. The pay of a simple soldier matched that of a journeyman in a moderately respected trade. Companies composed of foreign soldiers received better pay, but were also under stricter discipline.
Efforts were repeatedly made to transform the royal militia into a volunteer force. Because these failed, the militia was actually abolished for a four-year period in the 1690s. When war began again, the militia was reorganised on the basis of lots. Certain groups were exempted from service, and there were regions from which relatively few soldiers were demanded. Many people who were picked by lot paid substitutes instead. Officially, the service of the militia was confined to guard duty in the garrisons, but in wartime whole divisions were 'incorporated' into the regular army. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), this 'incorporation' occurred immediately on the summoning of the militia. The three-year service term, moreover, was not adhered to. According to Corvisier, not a single militiaman was discharged during the years 1708-12 after his service term came to an end.89
In 1702, a total of 220,000 men were under arms in the service of the French crown. A year later, the number had risen to about 300,000, more than ever before in any European kingdom.90 This tremendous military force, however, cannot be simply translated into the strength of the government internally. Since the object of wars was not defence against an invader, but rather to assert dynastic claims, many people did not see why they should put their life or those of their sons at risk, tolerate billeting and pay ever higher taxes. Military abuses reinforced this unwillingness. It was precisely in wartime, however, that the crown found it almost impossible to keep regiments ready for the purpose of putting down possible unrest. Their repressive power was confined to punishment expeditions - though these were, as a rule, draconian enough. Wherever possible, foreign mercenaries were employed for campaigns of this kind. Roger Mettam warns against overestimating the crown's capabilities for armed implementation of its policy.91 Even if we take into consideration the tremendous fiscal and directly military burdens imposed by the War of the Spanish Succession, the disturbances and protests that emerged at this time can scarcely be deemed a danger to the system of rule. On the contrary, uprisings were customary phenomena of an exercise of rule that denied whole strata of the population other opportunities of making their interests known.
For Louis XVI's reign, a hundred years later, J.F. Bosher reaches a different verdict from that of Roger Mettam on the reign of Louis XIV, seeing the crown's repressive potential as very far-reaching. He refers to the regular army with its strength of 150,000, a large territorial police troop (the maréchausée), 75,000 militia men (though from one decade to the next these were not called up, and not even trained), as well as the royal guards regiments with a further complement of at least 7,000 soldiers.92 The events of summer and autumn 1789, however, made it clear that the military potential of the crown could not be measured in troop strength, let alone its officially reported figures. Not only was the government's power of disposal of the means of repression restricted by the potential and in some cases actual resistance of soldiers to being deployed as a police force against people whose rebellion was kindled by hunger, but it was also limited by the social organisation of the army.
Just like other offices, commissions in the army (and the militia) were venal. They did not become hereditary, and officers did not pay the paulette. There were, however, possibilities for estate-type enrichment. In societies of the ancien-régime type, the appointment of officers expressed the basis of noble privilege. When professionalism was implemented, the nobility's traditional notion of honour was transformed into the honour of serving the king. In France, such development long remained limited, though this did not affect the high rank of an officer's commission. In actual fact, many officers of the royal army considered their post far more as a token of social rank than an obligation to professional activity. This meant, among other things, that reg-ular terms of service were unknown, and often even regular presence with the army. Many officers in the eighteenth century, according to Scott, only encountered lower ranks or private soldiers when they had to impose or execute punishments.93 The great majority of higher officers not only lived at a social distance from the rank and file or even junior officers, but also at a spatial remove. The training and provisioning of the latter was quite unfa-miliar to them, let alone the mood among the soldiers. In 1789, this situation led to Louis XVI's military advisers not venturing to express any opinion as to whether the regiments of the king's army would obey orders or not. We shall return to this situation below. What should be stressed for the moment is that the specific social form of military command limited the crown's disposal over its own army.
On the one hand, the development of the officer corps expressed the general conflicts over the continuation and defence of privileged social positions. On the other hand, the king's army was also a specific and particularly hard- contested ground for struggles over social position. In the course of the eight-eenth century, the army became something like a stubbornly defended last bastion in which the pre-eminence of the noblesse d'épée was still maintained.
In respect to the organisation of armed force, as elsewhere, the wars of reli-gion marked the decline of the nobility's traditional exercise of rule. Though cavalry played a central role in these battles, its organisation in the form of an assemblage of individual warriors had already been proved obsolete, and attempts were under way to reform it.
Whilst it had up until now been seen as a way of life for male nobles to fight when required in the king's wars, the new military techniques and updated strategies required both a more extensive training and a greater subordination than had previously been the custom. Not all were ready to adapt to these demands. From the time that officer commissions had to be bought, many nobles also lacked the means to compete with sons of families from the Third Estate, including those from the noblesse de robe who had only been ennobled in the last generation.
Already under Louis XIII, but especially under Louis XIV, the government undertook systematic efforts to undertake professionalisation of the army in a way that both maintained the social precedence of the noblesse d'épée and met the financial requirements of the crown. Whilst the purchase of officer com-missions and promotions was generally retained, this system was abolished for particular ranks, and for positions in the royal guards regiments, so as to offer the possibility of advance to high military posts for eminent but relatively poor members of the landed nobility.94 A seniority principle was introduced, under which experience and length of service became grounds for promotion. There continued to be promotions representing a reward for special services, and there were also opportunities for promotion for non-nobles. Such officiers de fortune, however, scarcely ever rose above junior officer rank. If this did happen, they were confined to routine activities, and continued to be treated socially by the other officers as common soldiers. From the time of Louis XIV on, apart from special technical companies there were hardly any officers in senior ranks who were French-born but not nobles.95
Though the wars of Louis XIV had initially nourished the hope that the crown's power politics would continue to provide for the noblesse d'épée and guarantee its social precedence over rising social groups, this certainty began to break down at the turn of the eighteenth century. The sons of the less well- off noblesse d'épée were confronted yet again with the power of money. On the one hand, such a luxurious lifestyle was customary among officers that private wealth was required to join in socially, while on the other hand the relatively poorer members of the noblesse d'épée were increasingly excluded from advance through non-venal positions. Promotions of this kind were awarded within each regiment, and since the long wars had eroded the private means of most officers, regimental funds were established to guarantee a retirement appropriate to their station. Promotions were now made dependent on the candidates declaring themselves ready to pay a particular sum to the regi-mental fund on taking up their new rank. This practice, known as convocation, was frequently forbidden, but not rooted out. In effect, the non-purchasable positions now also had a price, but this flowed not into the king's treasury but into the regimental fund. At all events, the proportion of members of the noblesse d'épée in the king's service had fallen by the mid-eighteenth century. But at least 80 per cent of all officers were still ‘of noble blood', amounting to about a quarter of potentially available male members of the noblesse d'épée.
Though non-noble officers were despised by their noble comrades as bourgeois, a detailed analysis does not completely bear out this judgement. More precisely, the nobles' defence strategies were directed against competitors who in almost all cases already bore a noble title. An officer commission enhanced the social value of a relatively recent ennoblement. In the view of many nobles d'épée, this effect was the only reason why the sons of well-to-do ‘bourgeois' sought a military career. For the military virtues, which, in their view, were inborn in any genuine noble, were necessarily lacking in members of the Third Estate. An increase in the proportion of non-noble officers, they argued, was bound to damage the army. When a cadet school was founded in 1751, the parents of these boys - who were accepted at an age between eight and eleven - had to show evidence that their family had been noble for at least four generations. According to Corvisier, this requirement was in fact met by the same procedure formerly used by the financial administration, the assertion of four witnesses sufficing to confirm such a period of nobility (supported if need be by the payment of bribes). The defenders of estate privilege objected not only to the tacit toleration of social ascent strategies, but also to measures aiming at realising a coincidence between noble rank and military command, as was the practice in Prussia (and in a certain sense also in England): i.e. the raising of all officers to noble status. In a decree of 1750, this practice was accepted for all officiers généraux (staff officers), as well as for junior officers whose fathers and grandfathers had already been exempt from the taille on the grounds of their military service, and who had been awarded the cross of St Louis as a reward for their long service career. There were very few individuals who could meet all these qualifications.96”翻译为中文