People's Army

Popular army, revolutionary army, or a combination of both terms or terms similar to popular and revolutionary, are names given to the national armed forces of various countries (China, Algeria, etc.) and non-regular armed forces of guerrilla organizations (in Latin American countries and other developing continents). The armed forces of several countries in the Eastern bloc (such as the German Democratic Republic) or those of one of the sides involved in different conflicts of the century were also called popular armies. -variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XX, such as the Constitutionalist Army of Mexico in the Mexican Revolution (1910, not to be confused with the so-called Popular Revolutionary Army, a guerrilla movement since the end of the century XX) or the Popular Republican Army of the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939, during which the The role of the militiamen spontaneously organized by political parties and unions was especially important both militarily, politically and socially (see Spanish Revolution of 1936).

With the name popular army its organizers usually want to give the character of an army to a popular militia or other types of armed institutions organized in a revolutionary or insurrectional way, at least in its historical beginning or as a pretense ideological; since, if they persist over time, their revolutionary or insurrectional character necessarily loses their spontaneous condition (if they ever had it), even if ideologically the maintenance of something similar to a permanent revolution is intended. If they are successful, they become a regular army and if not, a group that considers itself a guerrilla and is considered a terrorist by the state it fights.

The first popular or revolutionary armies were those that began the so-called Age of Revolutions or bourgeois revolutions: that of the United States in the American War of Independence (1775–1783) and the army of revolutionary France in the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1801).