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The French Army, 1750-1820: Careers, Talent, Merit. By Rafe Blaufarb. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2003. Distributed by Palgrave, St. Martin's Press, New York. ISBN 0-7190-6262-4. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 227. $69.95.
One of the most enduringly powerful myths of the French Revolution is that of the career open to talent, most particularly in the realm of the military. Rafe Blaufarb's book examines that myth as manifested in the French officer corps between 1750 and 1820 and demonstrates that this most fundamental of revolutionary ideas emanated from Old Regime aristocratic reformers, not from bourgeois aspirants. He concludes that attempts by successive revolutionary regimes to implement merit as the guiding principle for the choice and advancement of officers definitively ended the aristocracy's dominance of the officer corps, but institutionalized a concept of merit that combined talent with social rank and family ties.
Blaufarb joins a growing number of scholars whose work places the French Revolution and Napoleon in the context of a longer period stretching from the mid-eighteenth century to the...