every complaint of the soldier against his officer, however frivolous or ill founded, was listened to with eagerness, and investigated with partiality, on the principles of liberty and equality. Discipline accordingly became more and more relaxed; and the dissolution of several of the old corps, under the pretext of their being tainted with an aristocratic feeling, aggravated the confusion and inefficiency of the war department. Many of the most effective regiments during the last period of the monarchy had consisted of foreigners. These had either been slaughtered in defense of the throne against insurrections, like the Swiss, or had been disbanded, and had crossed the frontier to recruit the forces which were assembling for the invasion of France. Above all, the emigration of the noblesse had stripped the French army of nearly all its officers of high rank, and of the greatest portion of its subalterns. Above twelve thousand of the high-born youth of France, who had been trained to regard military command as their exclusive patrimony, and to whom the nation had been accustomed to look up as its natural guides and champions in the storm of war, were now marshaled beneath the banner of Condé and the other emigrant princes for the overthrow of the French armies and the reduction of the French capital. Their successors in the French regiments and brigades had as yet acquired neither skill nor experience; they possessed neither self-reliance, nor the respect of the men who were under them.
Such was the state of the wrecks of the old army; but the bulk of the forces with which France began the war consisted of raw insurrectionary levies, which were even less to be depended on. The Carmagnoles, as the revolutionary volunteers were called, flocked, indeed, readily to the frontier from every department when the war was proclaimed, and the fierce leaders of the Jacobins shouted that the country was in danger. They were full of zeal and courage, "heated and excited by the scenes of the Revolution, and inflamed by the florid eloquence, the songs, dances, and signal-words with which it had been celebrated."[1] But they were utterly undisciplined, and turbulently impatient of superior authority or systematic control. Many ruffians, also, who were sullied with participation in the most sanguinary horrors of Paris, joined the camps, and were pre-eminent alike for misconduct before the enemy and for savage insubordina-
- ↑ Scott, "Life of Napoleon," vol. i., c. viii.
