For a while after that, Joseph was so busy he could barely keep his feet on the ground. He and Carnot had to worry about every aspect of recruiting, organizing, equipping, and supplying the army.
Before this, every country recruited its armies. Recruiting soldiers cost a great deal of money, so armies were naturally limited in size. Even during the Thirty Years' War, European armies remained relatively small. Later, King Frederick II of Prussia began experimenting with conscription, turning tiny Prussia into a military power almost overnight.
Of course, if you wanted conscripts to be willing to fight for the king, the king had to keep them satisfied. So Frederick II promoted education for all and fervent patriotism, gradually transforming his subjects into citizens. This also meant that the Prussian soldiers under his command could fight bravely against nearly every military power in Europe at once during the Seven Years' War, all while receiving the lowest pay.
But there was a price. Subjects had no rights and few obligations, while citizens had many obligations—and would demand many rights in return. If you wanted to turn your citizens into a great pack of wolves, there was one precondition: you had to feed them meat!
During the reign of King Frederick II, Prussia gained enormous profits through a string of victorious wars. In other words, he made the pie bigger, so every class got a bigger slice than before, and everyone lived in harmony. But after King Frederick II died, things changed. Prussia no longer had a good chef who could keep making the pie bigger and bigger, so dividing up the spoils became a zero-sum game. Then Prussia's rulers realized that subjects were so much better than citizens... So Prussia began backtracking. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the pack