Page 79 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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Furthermore, in the old regime, “civilians” or rather the “bourgeoise” used to enjoy cer-
tain privileges, which allowed them to suffer from the weight of wars in a certain way
which we can consider as limited as opposed to villagers. It is not by coincidence that
there is not much memory of the usual destruction of the countryside as opposed to “ex-
emplary” plundering of cities (among which, Rome, Antwerp, Mantua and Magdeburg),
which were events that raised particular concern, owing to the extraordinary “violation”
of “civil” spaces.
On the other hand, the word “population” according to the meaning considered here-
in entered most of the European languages between the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. During most of the old regime, “population” as the set of inhabitants of a country
was not distinguished on the background of political-social panorama and it was mostly
considered as equivalent to ethnicity. Orders and “states” used to appear at the top.
Sovereigns addressed not their numerous subordinates as they did address the nobles or
heads of noble families in their messages to their subordinates, and it was through the
latter that they [sovereigns] attempted to reach down the juridical and social layers, all
the way to the lowest members. It does not come as a surprise that homes and families
were the units of reference for measurements, which were carried out of fiscal or mili-
tary purposes, in the so-called prestatistical era. Only during the Seventeenth century
did economists, cameralists, statisticians and demographist complete the long process
of “discovering” the “population” after having radically left aside schemes that were so
dear to the society of orders. Finally, the French Revolution pushed this line of tendency
towards the direction of politics, adding a further dimension to the word, suggested by
the centrality of other keywords, which have deeply connoted the ideological framework
of the last two-three centuries, namely “population” and “nation”.
To complete this stage consisting of the contemporaneity which is not only military,
it is possible to place citizen-soldier of the republic of modern times invoked by the most
radical part of Enlightenment and that came to life in George Washington’s army, and
later – and within certain bounds – in Lazare Carnot’s army. But the Atlantic Revolution,
on one side tore down the barriers which segmented traditional society (but it restored
them immediately on the basis of a census form) and on the other hand, it opened a way
to exceed the antinomy between “civil” and “military”, and at the same time, it ruled out
the union between the apexes of military power and civil power at the time and to the
extent in which modern constitutional forms established it, which had characterized the
old regime, independently from the effective military capacity of sovereigns. It is not
by chance that the term “militarism” was coined in France at the end of the Seventeenth
century by those who wanted to avoid the particular dérapage of the revolution, from
which actually General Bonaparte would have profited. 10
Above all, the inventory of contradictions which have distinguished the relation-
ship between military conflicts and civil populations to a certain extent stem from here.
The ideology of citizen-soldier, though it was mentioned in brackets particularly in the
Eighteenth century from the transformation of the mandatory draft to earnings of career

10 according to Le grand Robert, VI, p. 456 militarisme was coined in 1815, but in M. Cortelazzo - P.
Zolli, Dizionario etimologico, III, p. 756 the birth of the word dates back to 1790.