The word ‘reserve’, according to the French Robert dictionary, means ‘those forces not immediately committed, but held in readiness to intervene when needed ’. Michel Le Tellier was responsible for this significant reformulation of military theory, or at least for this clarification of French military terminology. The advent of a ‘National Reserve’ had to wait until 1791 and for the meaning of the term to be extended to ‘that part of a country’s military forces that is not maintained under the Colours, but may be recalled to them’. As for the word ‘reservist’, it may have been invented in the debates which took place during the passage of the Gouvion Saint-Cyr Act of 1872, since that is the year when Robert first signals its appearance.

The reservist is the subject of this article, even if the ‘Reserve’ from which his status derives is inseparable from the armed forces that direct his activity. With the abandonment of conscription in the majority of major military powers today, access to the Reserve is on a voluntary basis. The motives for volunteering can vary widely, depending on circumstances, the incentives offered by the armed forces and on the quality of their recruiting policy.

From the Mobilisation Reserve . . .

The purpose of a reserve was initially to create a manpower pool that would permit rapid reinforcement of the armed forces in the face of a threat that exceeded their peacetime capabilities: ‘. . . There will be, moreover, 510,000 men in the Reserve . . . and France will have a total of 1,185,000 men to repel an invasion . . . and this without any increased demands on the Treasury or on the population: because we will always have the same number of men under arms, and therefore agriculture, trade and industry will only lose the same number of man-days. (Very good! Very good!)'⁽¹⁾