The infantry, and in a less degree the cavalry, became good and trustworthy soldiers, and the glorious campaigns of 1794, 1795 and 1796, which were the direct result of Carnot's administration, bore witness to the potentialities of the essentially modern system. But, great as was the triumph of 1796-97, the exhaustion of years of continuous warfare had made itself felt: the armies were reduced to mere skeletons, and no sufficient means existed of replenishing them, till in 1798 the _conscription_ was introduced. From that time the whole male population of France was practically at her ruler's disposal; and Napoleon had full scope for his genius in organizing these masses. His principal improvements were effected in the interval between the peace of Amiens and the war with the third coalition, while threatening the invasion of England. His armies were collected in large camps on the coasts of the Channel, and there received that organization which, with minor variations, they retained during all his campaigns, and which has since been copied by all European nations. The divisions had already given place to the army corps, and Napoleon completed the work of his predecessors. He withdrew the whole of the cavalry and a portion of the artillery from the divisions, and thus formed "corps troops" and cavalry and artillery reserves for the whole army. The grade of marshal of France was revived at Napoleon's coronation. At the same time, the operation of Jourdan's law, acquiesced in during times of national danger and even during peace, soon found opposition when the conscripts realized that long foreign wars were to be their lot. It was not the actual losses of the field armies, great as these undoubtedly were, which led Napoleon in the full tide of his career to adopt the fatal practice of "anticipating" the conscription, but the steady increase in the number of _refractaires_, men who refused to come up for service. To hunt these men down, no less than forty thousand picked soldiers were engaged within the borders of France, and the actual French element in the armies of Napoleon grew less and less with every extension of the empire. Thus, in the Grand Army of 1809, about one-third of the corps of all arms were purely German, and in 1812 the army which invaded Russia, 467,000 strong, included 280,000 foreigners. In other words, the million of men produced by the original conscription of 1793 had dwindled to about half that number (counting the various subsidiary armies in Spain, &c.), and one hundred thousand of the best and sturdiest Frenchmen were engaged in a sort of civil war in France itself. The conscription was "anticipated" even in 1806, the conscripts for 1807 being called up before their time. As the later wars of the Empire closed one by one the foreign sources of recruiting, the conscription became more terrible every year, with the result that more _refractaires_ and more trusted