National Guard (France)

• 1. Introduction

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  In February 1792, the National Guard counted a twenty-three-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte among its officers. He served as lieutenant-colonel of the Battalion of Corsican Volunteers, and his own records described the posting as the beginning of his political career. The Guard itself had been declared only thirty months earlier. A newly formed bourgeois militia had been searching Paris for weapons that morning. It arrived first at the Hotel des Invalides, then at the famous fortress. The Marquis de Lafayette was elected commander in chief of that militia on the 14th of July 1789. Over the next century, the Guard was dissolved by kings and revived by revolutions. It was turned, more than once, against the very state it had been created to protect. France formally disbanded it in 1872. On the 12th of October 2016, France reconstituted it as the fifth service branch of its armed forces, 145 years after disbanding it. What was it about this citizens' force that made France keep returning to it?

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• 2. Born in Crisis

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  On the 11th of July 1789, a single royal act unsettled Paris. King Louis XVI had quietly dismissed his minister for finance and state, the popular Jacques Necker, replacing him with the Baron de Breteuil. Within hours, news of Necker's removal had spread through the city, triggering anger and violence in the streets. The National Assembly, alarmed, proposed an unusual solution: a bourgeois guard for Paris, formed from ordinary citizens rather than royal troops.

  Just two days later, on the 13th of July, the Assembly formally declared the formation of a milice bourgeoise. It was to be a force separate from the regular army, designed to maintain order and to defend Paris if necessary. In the same month, the French Guards, a royal regiment stationed in the city, mutinied and were disbanded. The majority of their rank and file joined the new Paris National Guard, giving the civilian force an experienced professional core almost immediately.

  The impulse to form citizen guards spread without any central direction. Towns and villages across France created their own local units in response to widespread fears of counter-revolution and disorder. In Limoges, in November 1789, the local force renamed itself the National Guard and barred any other military body from operating within the city. By the 14th of July 1790, these scattered provincial units were officially united under a single command. Lafayette accepted the title of Commandant General of all the National Guards of the Kingdom. His authority ran across the whole of France, though the King remained commander-in-chief of the armed forces and Lafayette answered to him.

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• 3. The Citizen-Soldier Ideal

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  On the 5th of December 1790, Maximilien Robespierre addressed the Assembly on the urgent question of the National Guard. He envisioned the force transforming from a loose, semi-organised militia into a body of genuine citizen-soldiers, independent from the regular army. Eighteen days later, on the 18th of December, the Assembly decreed the supply of 50,000 fusils to equip the force. Robespierre returned the following January with an even more radical argument: if necessary, ordinary people themselves should be armed with pikes.

  By the spring of 1791, the debates sharpened. On the 27th of April, Robespierre again took the floor to oppose a plan that would restrict Guard membership to active citizens, meaning those who met a qualifying property threshold. He wanted the Guard open to all. On the 22nd of April and again on the 15th of June, Parliament recruited 400,000 National volunteers from across France. On the 17th of July, those tensions reached a violent breaking point at the Champ de Mars massacre.

  By autumn, the Guard's formal structure was fixed in law. Under the statute of the 14th of October 1791, every active citizen and every son over the age of eighteen was obliged to enlist. Five neighbourhood units formed an infantry battalion; eight to ten battalions formed a legion. Veterans over sixty and young men under eighteen could each serve in separate companies. The Chevalier de Saint-Georges was among the first to join the Garde Nationale in Lille. Guardsmen kept their weapons and uniforms at home, ready to be called when required. Those uniforms had been standardised in 1791: dark blue coats with red collars, white lapels and cuffs, drawn from the Paris National Guard's original dress; the standard headdress was the tricorne. The colour combination echoed the revolutionary tricolour flag.

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• 4. Revolutionary Force

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  The Guet royal, Paris's main force for maintaining public order, had held that role since 1254. In 1791, when the National Guard took over those policing responsibilities, the last holder of that office made the transition directly. De La Rothière, who bore the title Chevalier du Guet, was elected to lead the National Guard that year. The summer of 1792 brought a more fundamental change. The fédérés, volunteer militia members from the provinces, were admitted into the Guard. During the insurrection of the 10th of August 1792, a commander named Mandat was murdered in the opening hours. Antoine Joseph Santerre, a brewer and committed revolutionary, stepped in to take command of the Paris Guard.

  On the 21st of September 1792, the monarchy was abolished. The National Guard now fought openly for the Republic. The Guard used its armed strength to compel the National Assembly to bend to the demands of the Paris Commune; the presence of the 'patriotic' bayonets was more persuasive than any argument in the chamber. The insurrection of the 31st of May began when the Commune chose François Henriot to lead the Paris Guards. His appointment signalled that the Guard had become an instrument of radical politics rather than an institution standing above it.

  After the 9th of Thermidor, year II, which fell on the 27th of July 1794, the Thermidorian Reaction removed Robespierre from power. The new government placed the Guard under more conservative leadership. Part of the Guard then joined the royalist insurrection on the 13th of Vendémiaire, year IV, the 5th of October 1795. They attempted to bring down the Directory itself. The uprising was put down by military forces. It was in that battle that Napoleon Bonaparte appeared as a defender of the Republic rather than a member of its militia. The Paris National Guard thereafter ceased to play any significant political role.

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• 5. Napoleon's Double Game

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  Napoleon did not believe the middle-class National Guard could be trusted to maintain order or suppress riots. He established the Municipal Guard of Paris to take on that work: a full-time body, strongly militarised, functioning as a professional gendarmerie. The National Guard he kept alive but partially disarmed, held in reserve. In Paris during this period, the Guard consisted of roughly 12,000 bourgeois property owners who served part-time. They equipped themselves at their own expense and spent most of their service guarding public buildings on a roster basis.

  Between 1811 and 1812, Napoleon reorganised the Guard into formations called cohorts. These were designated for home defence only, not for the campaigns being fought elsewhere in Europe. The disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 changed the calculation. In the following year, dozens of Guard cohorts were called up for field duty. Four cohorts were combined to form a single line infantry regiment; in this way, the 135ème through 156ème Régiments d'Infanterie de Ligne came into being. These units fought in Germany in 1813 and in the defence of north-eastern France in 1814.

  As manpower shortages grew severe, Napoleon extended conscription to age groups previously exempt from military service. Students, gamekeepers, and volunteers from other professional groups formed their own separate units within the Guard. Clothing and equipment were often in short supply; even the Paris National Guard was eventually forced to issue pikes to some of its new recruits as substitute weapons. When Napoleon I abdicated in 1814, the field units formed from the Guard cohorts were dissolved. Six thousand national guardsmen fought in the Battle of Paris that year. After Coalition forces occupied the city, the Guard was rapidly expanded to 35,000 men and became the primary force for maintaining order in Paris.

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• 6. Kings and Citizens

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  Louis XVIII restored the National Guard in 1814 without hesitation. The force was purged of its Napoleonic officers and put under leadership loyal to the restored monarchy. Relations were initially stable. The future Charles X served as the Guard's Colonel-General, reviewing it regularly and intervening to veto a proposal from the Conseil to disband the force on grounds of economy.

  By 1827, the middle-class men who composed the Guard had grown openly hostile to the reactionary direction of Charles X's reign. At a review held on the 29th of April, the assembled guardsmen greeted their king with hostile cries. Charles dissolved the Guard the following day, citing the insult to the crown as grounds. He did not bother to disarm the disbanded soldiers. Three years later, in 1830, those uncollected muskets reappeared in Parisian hands during the July Revolution. The revolution drove Charles X from the throne.

  The National Guard established in 1831, in the wake of that revolution, played a significant role in suppressing the Paris June Rebellion of 1832 against the government of King Louis-Phillipe I. By 1848, that same force was fighting alongside the republicans in the Revolution of 1848. Its loyalties had not changed in any structural sense; the Guard's membership remained a middle-class body throughout. What had shifted was a general erosion of support for Louis-Phillipe and the institution his critics called the 'Bourgeois Monarchy.' The same middle-class composition that had kept the Guard loyal to one regime while it fought against another would pose a new kind of problem under the Second Empire.

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• 7. Commune and Collapse

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  Napoleon III viewed the National Guard as a political liability under the Second Empire. He confined it to subordinate tasks, deliberately limiting its capacity for liberal or republican organisation. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 overturned that arrangement. The Government of National Defense called on the Guard to take a central role in defending Paris against the Prussian army, a sharp reversal for a force that had been deliberately sidelined.

  The Paris Commune, which ran from March to May 1871, transformed the Guard one final time. The force was expanded to include all able-bodied Parisian citizens capable of carrying weapons. It had become a mass fighting force aligned with the Commune's radical politics. When the regular French Army crushed the Commune, the National Guard was officially abolished and its units dissolved. The Garde Nationale Mobile, a separate rapid-deployment reserve raised in 1866, was disbanded alongside it.

  On the 14th of March 1872, France formally dissolved the National Guard by law. Converted from a volunteer reserve into a mostly conscript body, it had lost its original character and its reason for existing. The regular army had long opposed maintaining any large armed force outside its direct control. The role of the Paris units in the Commune uprising had generated deep hostility, particularly within the army. The territorial regiments that replaced the Guard were composed of older men who had completed their full-time military service. They were mobilised only in times of general war and were distinguished from the regular army by nothing more than details of insignia.

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• 8. Return After 145 Years

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  A series of terrorist attacks, intensifying through 2014 and 2015, prompted the French government to reconsider a form of national mobilisation not seen since 1872. President François Hollande announced the establishment of a third National Guard, to be formed from the country's military reserve forces. Its officers, unlike those of the revolutionary Guard, would be seconded from both the Army and the National Gendarmerie. All would be graduates of their respective military academies.

  The revived Guard was expected to grow to 72,500 members by 2017 and to 86,000 by 2018. A dedicated budget of 311 million euros was set aside for its formation. The new Guard would reinforce both the National Gendarmerie and the National Police in securing major events across France, alongside its historical function as a national military and police reserve. Its personnel would be drawn from the military reserves, from the private sector, and from active service members seconded to the new branch.

  As of 2024, Division General François-Xavier Poisbeau holds the post of Secretary-General for the National Guard. He reports to both the Chief of Defence Staff and the Minister of the Armed Forces.

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