French original
André
Loez, 14-18. Les refus de la guerre. Une histoire des mutins [Refusing
War : A History of the Mutineers], Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio
Histoire », 2010.
For a long time the mutinies of 1917 have been
interpreted as the expression of the discontent, real but transient, of
soldiers weary of war. In a detailed
original study André Loez presents them as being, by contrast, a genuine social
movement of which pacifism is only the most worked-out form.
In
the historiography of the Great War the time of refusal has come. (1) The publication of André Loez’s work devoted to the
French mutinies of 1917 confirms this turn. Since historian Guy Pedroncini’s
pioneering 1967 book* this iconic event has often been considered marginal,
ephemeral, and inconsequential: if it wasn’t the outcome of a pacifist
plot, it was, according to Pedroncini, not about ‘refusing to fight’ but about
‘refusing a certain way of doing it’. (2) Subsequently, collective memory has stuck
the mutinies in a consensus of compassion, vividly illustrated in Lionel
Jospin’s speech in Craonne in 1998. (3)
With
notable rigour and clarity, André
Loez distances himself from those hallowed interpretations,
He convincingly refutes Pedroncini’s
conclusions and so opens new perspectives for a global
socio-history of refusals of war between 1914 and 1918, breaking with the
cultural anthropology of conflict constructed around the hypothesis of
« consent ».
The crisis of disobedience in the French
army in 1917
The mutinies of April-June 1917 were not a minor,
marginal episode during the conflict. With 27 more mutinies being taken into
account – making a total of 111 mutinies in 61 divisions – the direct range of
the episode is broadened: to arrive at this figure, Loez has actually set
aside the hundred or so incidents counted by Guy Pedroncini or Denis Rolland (4)
whose basis in facts is virtually unknown, and added the new outbreaks of
disorder revealed by archives and witness testimony. No doubt there will some quibbling over the
extent of the movement, with the inevitable gaps in its documentation making a
complete picture impossible. This would be to miss the main point that Loez is
making: that the mutinies form a kernel surrounded by a
« halo » of indiscipline throughout the French army in spring 1917. Desertions
and overstaying leave multiplied: in the five divisions studied by the
author, the number of desertions doubled in mid-May 1917, and even tripled at
the end of May and in June (p. 209). In the 77th Infantry Division (DI), 15% of
the strength left the front « illegally » : so we have to
rethink how far disobedience went at the end of spring 1917, when a self-demobilisation
movement got under way, comparable to what happened in the Russian or German
armies. In fact, it was this wave of collective disobedience that forced a halt
to offensives until the autumn, against the wishes of Pétain, who was appointed
Commander-in-Chief just before these
events.
Moreover, the mutinies are located in a
« continuum of indiscipline » (Timothy Parsons [5])
that runs through the conflict from its beginning. Therefore the events of
spring 1917 must not be read in a linear fashion : it wasn’t a matter of
[self-]demobilisation followed, when it failed, by a patriotic remobilisation.
The meaning of the term « refusal » itself needs to be re-thought. It
is not to be understood as a motivated, politically coherent rejection of the
rationale for war; pacifism was
only at the most articulate end of a vast spectrum of
standpoints. Rather, these refusals occur at the intersection of two mental processes,
that of withdrawing from the war and that of illegally resorting to
indiscipline. To refuse war does mean “wanting it to end, not wanting to be
part of it any longer, putting that wish into practice”. (p.545) So the refusal
of war can take the form of unstructured disorder, noisy one-off
demonstrations, or on the other hand lead to petitions, processions, marching
on Paris; even the tamest forms cannot by any means be discounted.
The
Mutinies as a social movement in wartime
The
mutinies constitute, within the massive social institution that the French army
was in 1917, a wartime social movement;
they can thus be considered with the help of a sociology of obscure or emerging
social movements, of which the author has a thorough grasp. At the same time
they unfolded in the particular context of the 1914 conflict, during which
demonstrations and taking up a position in public, whether against the war or
not, were under strict surveillance. By definition, the mutinies were
transgressive, even if it was possible to limit their effects. The fact that
they occurred in – and not before or after – spring 1917 is nevertheless due to the
rising tide of events preceding them; it was the cumulative modification of the
structure of opportunities perceived by those who acted that gave them the
feeling they could act. This new interpretation thus requires that we establish
the precise chronology of the events to place them in their exact sequence, but
also that we study the improvised cohort of mutineers sociologically.
Why
do soldiers mutiny? Most often, mutinies break out because of a perceived
immediate threat – of an attack or of going back to the trenches – or by
contagion from another movement, spread by rumour. The soldiers’ “characteristic thought
process” (p.178) tends to reinforce
anxiety. In 1917, the rear in fact became the transmitter of stress to a
previously unheard-of extent: catastrophist rumours circulated around the
strikes that broke out in Paris and elsewhere but were to die down before the
mutinies reached their height between 30 May and & 7 June 1917.
The
collective anxiety the rumours conveyed gained strength from the series of
events cropping up here and there with the Nivelle offensive and its failure in
the Chemin des Dames, which ended any hope of the “final” offensive. The
announcement of the German withdrawal of March 1917, the publication of the
Bolshevik peace proposals on 14 May, the start of the campaign to report on revolutionary
Russia in Le Petit Parisien on
20 May, the strikes in Paris and anticipation of the international socialist conference
in Stockholm which was to open the way for a reconvened International to formulate a peace agenda – all those
events combined to make the soldiers aware of a possible “end” on which their
standpoint could focus. After that, the appointment of Pétain as
Commander-in-Chief on 15 May was sometimes viewed by the troops not as a sign
of restored stability, but of things going adrift in the army. An analogous, but
converse movement influenced the mutinies’ decline: the refusal of passports
for Stockholm under pressure from Pétain, and the speech made by the President
of the Council on 1st June rejecting any compromise peace, deprived the
movement of any realistic outcome, while the gradual resumption of control by
the military establishment stifled its dynamism. The end of the mutinies
parallels, in a different context, the way social movements ordinarily fall
apart in peace-time (p502)
The
role of Pétain
Redrafting
the exact chronology of the mutinies dispels whatever remained – really not
much – of Pétain’s 1917 aura. Two received ideas still surround his role: that
he was appointed to put a stop to the mutinies; and that he showed in
that process a measure of leniency towards the soldiers who mutinied. In reality,
the generalissimo was not called in to “re-establish order” since he was
appointed several days before the government was informed about the state of
mutiny, on 26 and 27 May. Neither is the limitation of the number of executions
to be laid to his account: the repression was not so much moderated as
circumscribed and toned down by the political authorities.(p.516) On the
contrary, it was Pétain who reinstated at the beginning of June the exceptional
judicial measures identical with those that obtained at the start of the
war: the special courts martial, ended
in April 1916, were brought back for a few weeks, during which 57 soldiers were
executed. (6) But the repression – prison, forced labour – was real and cannot
be reduced to those shot as an example in the absence of “leaders” who were very
difficult to identify.
The
decision to act was taken by a minority of soldiers; the author consequently
does not at all dispute the fact that the mutineers formed a limited group of
individuals. Many historians have used
this to argue the conclusion that the mutinies were only a limited, marginal
movement of dissent; in reality, commitment and refusal are always and
everywhere the exception, numerically (p.200) . The mutinies are therefore no
different from other social movements. So we now have to try to arrive at a
detailed sociology of the mutinying group.
A sociology
of the mutineers
The
author acknowledges that the task is a difficult one, due to the lack of
sources. He bases himself, however, on a substantial set of 1757 individuals taken
from five divisions (7), subdivided into 443 “mutineers” (condemned for
demonstrating against the conflict during the 1917 mutinies) and 1314
“non-mutineers” (sentenced for various acts of disobedience throughout the year
1917). The proportion of previous offenders in the two groups is almost the
same: so the mutineers are not “hard cases” or “bad soldiers” who have been
sentenced before. Belonging to a département
occupied
by the enemy doesn’t in any way preclude participation in the mutiny movement. The
presence of the “Parisians” is stronger, no doubt from a shared experience of
how to make demands, more widespread in the capital. The mutineers, on the
other hand, are “youngsters”: more than 50%
of them belonging to the 1914-1917 intake. So they didn’t get “1914”, the point
when the case for the war to defend France crystallised, and they were
socialised in a body permeated with a discourse of refusal. The socio-professional
make-up of the mutineer group is equally revealing: industrial workers are
practically absent, like the most socially dominant jobs – carters, building
workers and day labourers. Among the troops at risk, it is the best educated
and least subordinated who take the active step; the presence of teachers only
among the mutineers is also significant. The inclination to mutiny is stronger
in proportion as the feeling of being trapped in an endless war can be
expressed in a socially articulate way.
By
making use of sociology, the author distances himself from interpretations
which treat individual will and conscience as the springboard for collective
acts and practice. An army at war is a mass institution which requires to be
studied as such. Thus it is not necessary to want war in order to have to wage it;
modern states have in fact developed their power through mobilising their
citizens more or less against their will. So soldiers have been forced to
justify their presence at the front, without ever having a real possibility of
withdrawing from it. To be a soldier is an involuntary condition, provisional
and incomplete. (p.27) The author,
following Gérard Noiriel, consequently
challenges the way numerous historians attribute to ordinary people patriotic sentiments
whose existence is not massively corroborated by the archives: according to André Loez, on the
contrary, there is a normal relation to the conflict which does not presuppose
any voluntary, explicit adherence to the rationale imposed, essentially, by élites
to justify the war.
It
must not be forgotten, however, that the states putting mobilisation techniques
into operation, up to the eve of the 1914 war, did so precisely through a
process of making the masses nationalist. The state’s construction from a
diverse population of a common national identity, allowing an invented people
to see itself as a subject of history, is an extremely powerful institutional
and symbolic process that gets a grip on individuals. Without naming it explicitly,
Loez repeatedly alludes to its main elements: the education system and a
national theology formulated by the intellectuals and the holders of cultural
authority. Admittedly, the types of adherence
it leads to cannot be reduced to
voluntary, explicit consent; there is no divorcing from an army at war. But
this national co-opting of the masses cannot remain entirely unconsidered, even
if it turns out that we need to get away from a reductionist idea of it. That
is the mystery of the 1914 mobilisation: individuals acknowledged, from having too little understood and tacitly accepting it, the existence of an entity
that legitimised the act of killing and demanded the anticipated sacrifice of
oneself. Something of this remained, in 1917, when the unfinished social
movement aborted.
If
war is a secret known only to those in the fighting, peace is not their
business: according to Loez, it was not they, either in Russia or elsewhere in
Europe, who decided the outcome of the conflict – or of any other – however
radical their movement and thorough-going their indiscipline. The
overwhelmingly ‘legitimate’ character of the French defensive war condemned
them to wait until it was won for repayment of the incalculable debt demanded of
them by a state in which their “rights”, vaunted by Clemenceau in 1919, were in reality very feeble.
Translated version: LW, February 2014
From a review essay by Romain Ducoulombier,
21 April 2010
Notes
[2] Guy Pedroncini,
Les Mutineries de 1917, Paris, PUF, 1967, p. 312-313.
[3] Philippe Olivera, « Le mutin derrière le fusillé, ou le silence durable de l’acteur », in André Loez, Nicolas Mariot (dir.),
Obéir/Désobéir. Les mutineries de 1917 en perspective, Paris, La Découverte, 2008, p. 416-432.
[4] Denis Rolland,
La Grève des tranchées. Les mutineries de 1917, Paris, Imago, 2005.
[5] Timothy Parsons,
The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa, Londres, Praeger, 2003.
[6] 26 soldats sont condamnés pour des manifestations « collectives » de désobéissance, les autres à titre seulement « individuel ». On peut débattre par conséquent de l’appartenance des seconds au groupe des fusillés pour actes de mutinerie.
