The second, following from this, was that the entire society would be mobilized to support the military. The first was a new relationship to the state, with an implicit post-revolutionary compact whereby all those united and protected as citizens owed a similar duty of protection to the state: from now on, the body of the citizen was intimately tied to the survival of the body politic. But the levée meant more than the creation of a mass army, being built on two key ideas. This call for mass conscription (literally, a ‘mass uprising’) would transform the French military, replacing the professional army within the year with a vast, national army of 800,000 trained soldiers made up of citizens. The young men shall go to battle the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions the women shall make tents and clothing and shall serve in the hospitals the children shall turn old linen into lint the aged shall betake themselves to the public places in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic. Its opening point declared:įrom this moment until that in which the enemy shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. On 23 August 1793, facing possible defeat in its revolutionary wars with Austria, Prussia, Spain, Britain and the United Provinces, as well as internal insurrections, the French National Convention issued a ‘levée en masse’. It concludes that this ‘war’ was only the beginning and that anthropogenic environmental factors will play an increasing role in human conflicts in coming years.įrom levée-en-masse to levée- en- masse- medias The paper explores the problems governments face in remobilization, the new data regime of informational totalitarianism remobilization will help produce and the likely instability of the post-covid-19 international order. Beyond the civil war against the body, however, there was also the civil war within the domestic populations who were active participants in this imploded home front line, producing and sharing both feel-good and disciplinary propaganda and engaging in debates around politics, conspiracy theories and disinformation. With space cut-off, this became a war of time and of endurance, with relations reduced, as Virilio suggests, to those of the connected ‘terminal citizen’. The paper explores how each nation was forced by the virus into a pause of global connections and relationships and a war against the human body, with the ‘total demobilization’ and bunkerization of their domestic populations. This paper argues that the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic of 2019–2020 constituted the first Anthropocenic war: as an anthropogenic virus and biological attack on the human body and as the first global pandemic requiring a truly global response since our recognition of the Anthropocene.
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