Levée en masse is the French term for mass conscription.
Origins
In the polis envisioned in Plato's Laws, the militia would include the entire population, and women and children would drill alongside men.
Under Alfred the Great, the Wessex fyrd was divided in two, with half the farmers staying home to tend their crops, and the other half levied to serve in the army, then rotating back to the village.
In feudal times, peasant levies were often used to supplement levies of men-at-arms, usually as sappers, pioneers, woodcutters etc., and not as fighting men. Some jurisdictions, like France, developed the institution of corvée, whereby laborers were conscripted annually by their seigneur for either military or non-military duties.
Pospolite Ruszenie
In Poland, the levying of gentry and peasantry together became known as pospolite ruszenie. Non-Polish historians often use the anachronistic French term levée en masse to denote the institution.
Before the 13th century pospolite ruszenie was the customary method employed in the raising of royal Polish armies. Gradually, however, because of the perceived unreliability of untrained peasants, it became rare for large numbers of them to be mobilised. Instead, the levies included knights—who later transformed into nobles (szlachta)—along with wojts and soltys.
Pospolite in Commonwealth Poland
Pospolite ruszenie units were usually organised on voivodship basis and varied in quality. Szlachta from regions like Kresy, where combat was common, created farily competent units, while those from peaceful regions of the Commonwealth lacked battle experience and training and often were substandard compared to the wojsko kwarciane or mercenaries.
Szlachta usually created cavalry units, and their favoured weapon was szabla (a kind of saber).
The privileges granted the nobility by succesive kings severly curtailed the royal perogative in calling for pospolite ruszenie, especially for actions outside the territory of Poland.
The Later Pospolite
Under the influence of revolutionary France and Enlightenment ideas about the role of the militia, the pospolite ruszenie of post-partition Poland was deemed to consist of all able males between 18 and 40 years of age. In 1806 by decree of Napoleon, the pospolite ruszenie in the Duchy of Warsaw served for a short period as the reserve force and recruitment pool for the regular army. During the November Uprising in 1831, the Sejm called for pospolite ruszenie from ages 17 to 50, but that plan was opposed by General Jan Zygmunt Skrzynecki .
Between 1918 and 1939, in the Second Republic of Poland, the pospolite ruszenie was considered to consist of reserve soldiers from ages 40 to 50 and officers from ages 50 to 60. They had to participate in army exercises and serve in armed forces during times of war.
The Modern Levée
The modern levée en masse was born in the French Revolutionary Wars. A decree by the National Convention on 23 August, 1793 began
"From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn linen into lint; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic"
The response to this decree was immediate, with French forces swelling from around 270,000 to in excess of one and a half million men.
Though not a novel idea—cf. thinkers as diverse as Plato, above and the lawyer and linguist Sir William Jones (who thought every adult male should be armed with a musket at public expense)—the actual practice of a levée en masse was rare before the French Revolution. The French levée was a key development in modern warfare and would lead to steadily larger armies with each successive war - culminating in the enormous bloodbaths of World Wars One and Two during the first half of the Twentieth Century.
