Ch. vi. in France. 367 



law, which had exempted married persons from 

 conscriptions; and those who married subse- 

 quently to this new regulation were taken indis- 

 criminately with the unmarried. And though 

 after this the levies fell in part upon those who 

 were actually engaged in the peopling of the 

 country ; yet the number of marriages untouched 

 by these levies might still remain greater than the 

 usual number of marriages before the revolution ; 

 and the marriages which were broken by the 

 removal of the husband to the armies would not 

 probably have been entirely barren. 



Sir Francis d'lvernois, who had certainly a 

 tendency to exaggerate, and probably has exag- 

 gerated considerably, the losses of the French 

 nation, estimates the total loss of the troops of 

 France, both by land and sea, up to the year 1799, 

 at a million and a half.* The round numbers 

 which I have allowed for the sake of illustrating 

 the subject, exceed Sir Francis dlvernois's esti- 



* Tableau des Pertes, &c. c. ii. p. 7. — M. Gamier, in the 

 notes to his edition of Adam Smith, calculates that only about a 

 sixtieth part of the French population was destroyed in the armies. 

 He supposes only 500,000 embodied at once, and that this num- 

 ber was supplied by 400,000 more in the course of the war ; and 

 allowing for the number which would die naturally, that the 

 additional mortality occasioned by the war was only about 45,000 

 each year. Tom. v. note xxx. p. 284. If the actual loss were no 

 more than these statements make it, a small increase of births would 

 have easily repaired it ; but I should think that these estimates 

 are probably as much below the truth, as Sir Francis dTvernois's 

 are above. 



