Malet enlisted as a Musketeer at age seventeen as was common for a young nobleman of the Ancien Régime, but King Louis XVI disbanded the musketeer regiments in 1776 for budgetary reasons. In 1790 Malet's family disinherited him for supporting the French revolution, when he became commander of his home town's National Guard and celebrated the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Malet volunteered for the Revolutionary army when war broke out and was assigned to the 50th infantry regiment of the Army of the Rhine as a captain.