sought the benefits following the amnesty put in place. Similarly to how the proportions of males that were sent varied depending on what region they lived in, the same applied for deserters. The historian Hargenvillier produced a detailed statistical breakdown of the percentage of desertions that flanked that specific department from 1798 to 1804. In hopes of showing that like the previous levées that were proposed by the French government in an attempt to raise the number of troops, there were different reactions depending on region. There were regions where there was little to no resistance to the levée and no large amount of deserters, while other regions had nearly 60 percent deserters. Popular reaction For all the rhetoric, the levée en masse was not popular; desertion and evasion were high. However, the effort was sufficient to turn the tide of the war, and there was no need for any further conscription until 1797, when a more permanent system of annual intakes was instituted. An effect of the levée en masse was the creation of a national army in France, made up of citizens, rather than an all-professional army, as was the standard practice of the time. Its main result, protecting French borders against all enemies, surprised and shocked Europe. The levée en masse was also effective in that by putting on the field many men, even untrained, it required France's opponents to man all fortresses and expand their own standing armies, far beyond their capacity to pay professional soldiers. The levée en masse also offered many opportunities for untrained people who could demonstrate their military proficiency, allowing the French army to build a strong officer and non-commissioned cadre. Though not a novel idea—see for example thinkers as diverse as Plato and the lawyer and linguist Sir William Jones (who thought every adult male should be armed with a musket at public expense)—the actual practice of a levée en masse was rare before the French Revolution. The levée was a key development in modern warfare and would lead to steadily larger armies with each successive war, culminating in the enormous conflicts of World War I and World War II during the first half of the 20th century. "Levée en masse" in Nazi Germany Hitler proclaimed a levée en masse in early January 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge at a meeting of his "inner circle" of Hitler with Martin