1917 French Army Mutinies | World War I

During World War I, the 1917 French Army mutinies occurred among French Army men on the Western Front in Northern France. They began shortly after the Nivelle Offensive's paramount engagement, the failed and expensive Second Battle of the Aisne, in April 1917. General Robert Nivelle, the new French commander of the Army in France, had promised a decisive triumph over the Germans in 48 hours; morale in the French armies had soared to new heights, and the shock of defeat had soured their attitude overnight. Nevertheless, nearly half of the French infantry divisions stationed on the Western Front were involved in mutinies and related disruptions to varying degrees. Militaries continued in trenches and were willing to defend but refused orders to attack. Therefore the term "mutiny" is a misnomer. General Philippe Pétain succeeded Nivelle and restored morale by speaking with the men and promised no more suicide attacks, rest for weary divisions, leave, and moderate discipline. He held 3,400 courts-martial, in which 554 mutineers were sentenced to death, with 26 of them being executed.

The Nivelle Offensive's extreme optimism and dashed hopes, sparked by the Russian Revolution and the trade union movement, were also influential, as was disappointment at the non-arrival of American troops, whom French soldiers on the front had unrealistically expected to arrive within days of the US declaration of war. The Germans were kept back in the dark about the mutinies, and their entire scope was not exposed until decades later. One of the most crucial intelligence failures of the war was the German failure to detect the mutinies.

Table: Summary of 1917 French Army Mutinies

By early 1917, more than one million French troops had been killed in battle, out of a populace of twenty million French males of all ages. The French had lost their will to attack as a result of their defeats. In April 1917, French General Nivelle assured a decisive victory that would end the war. He advocated collaborating with the British Army to break through German lines on the Western Front by launching a massive attack against the German-held Chemin des Dames, a long and prominent ridge running east to the west immediately north of the Aisne River. Nivelle deployed a creeping barrage, a strategy he had used successfully during the First and Second Aggressive Combats of Verdun in October and December 1916. French artillery fired rounds slightly in front of the advancing Army to keep the Germans under cover until they were overcome.

Nivelle's onslaught at the Second Battle of the Aisne fell short of its primary goal of winning the war. The attack drained the German reserves and conquered some tactically significant sites at a high cost in terms of losses. Near Berry-au-Bac, a French tank offensive was also launched, but half of the Schneider CA1 tanks engaged were destroyed. On 15 May 1917, Nivelle was relieved of command and replaced by General Philippe Pétain. In 1915, a similar engagement would have been considered a draw, but in 1917, the soldiers' morale was weak following the massive casualties at the Battles of Verdun and the Somme. The French infantrymen's morale plummeted due to the strategic failure and losses, which had been so high only a few days earlier. Nevertheless, France was ecstatic when the United States entered the war in early April 1917.

The Nivelle Offensive was unsuccessful to achieve its strategic goals, and most of the combat had ceased by 25 April. The French 2nd Division refused to fight on 3 May, and the mutiny quickly spread across the Army. For the most part, events were self-contained and focused on specific objectives, such as more liberty, more time with families, and better cantonment circumstances. On the 16th and 17th of May, disturbances were in a 127th Division Chasseur battalion and an 18th Division regiment. A brigade of the 166th Division staged a demonstration two days later, while the 128th Battalion of the 3rd Division and the 66th Battalion of the 18th Division violated orders on 20 May. In the 17th Division, there were isolated acts of disobedience. Two 69th Division regiments elected spokespeople over the next two days to call for an end to the onslaught. Mutinies erupted in the 9th Division, 158th Division, 5th Division, and 1st Cavalry Division by 28 May. More troops of the 5th, 6th, 13th, 35th, 43rd, 62nd, 77th, and 170th Divisions mutinied by the end of May, resulting in revolts in 21 divisions. In 1917, a record 27,000 French soldiers defected. The offensive was halted on 9 May.

Even in units where direct combat was expected, such as the 74th Infantry Regiment, the troops did not damage their superiors and refused to attack. The majority of the mutineers were veterans who did not refuse to fight but wanted the military to pay more attention to the realities of modern warfare. The militaries had come to trust that the attacks they had been told to carry out were pointless. News of Russia's February Revolution was widely reported in socialist publications in France, and anonymous pacifist propaganda leaflets were widely disseminated. Troops refused to obey orders or travel to the front in Soissons, Villers-Cotterêts, Fère-en-Tardenois and Cœuvres-et-Valsery. Missy-aux-Bois was taken occupied by a French army regiment on 1 June. According to Ashworth, the mutinies were broad and persistent, involving more than half of the French Army's divisions. Pétain informed British commander Sir Douglas Haig on 7 June that two French divisions had refused to relieve two front-line divisions.

Guy Pedroncini analyzed French military archives in 1967 and determined that 49 infantry divisions had been destabilized and had experienced many mutinies. In addition, nine divisions were severely harmed by mutinous behaviour, 15 were severely damaged, and 25 were injured by single but frequent occurrences of rebellious behaviour. By the end of 1917, 43 percent of the French Army's infantry divisions had been impacted. The infantry, who had taken the brunt of the casualties since the beginning of the conflict, suffered the most from the moral crisis. The heavy artillery, which was stationed far beyond the front lines, and the other cavalry regiments were unaffected by the mutinies. On the contrary, they provided detachments to gather up deserters and restore order. As a result, the indiscipline issue affected only 12 field artillery regiments.

The military authorities acted quickly and decisively beginning on 8 June. Following widespread arrests, mass trials were held. Those detained were chosen by their commanders and NCOs, with the rank and file's implicit acquiescence. There were 3,427 military advisors. Pedroncini's study in 1967 discovered 2,878 sentences of hard labour and 629 death sentences, but only 49 executions. Some French divisional commanders were irritated by the lack of rigour with which the mutinies were suppressed. On the other hand, Pétain and French President Raymond Poincaré made it a priority to restore the French Army's morale and avoid responding in a way that would exacerbate the disaster.

There were some demonstrations among Russian units in France when word of the revolution in Russia and the abdication of the Tsar reached them. On 16 April, the French Army snatched the Russians away from the front and transferred them to central France after receiving instruction from Russia to elect soviets. The Russians staged a large May Day procession before mutinying. In September 1917, loyal Russian troops encircled the First Russian Brigade at Camp de La Courtine and blasted them with artillery, killing eight men and wounded 28 more. This incident sparked widespread erroneous reports that the French had shelled French forces. About 10,000 Russian troops were demobilized, assigned to work battalions, and the ringleaders were sentenced to hard labour in North Africa.

Pétain offered two incentives in addition to the deterrent of military punishment. First, more regular and extended leave and a halt to significant offensives until tanks and Americans arrive on the front lines. At the Battle of the Observatories and La Malmaison, Pétain launched limited artillery attacks on the northern side of the 3rd Combat of Ypre, at Verdun, on the Chemin des Dames throughout the Combat of the Observatories, and the north side of the 3rd Battle of Ypre. They were seized with minor casualties among the French. The mutinous soldiers were driven by despair rather than politics or pacifism. They worried that machine guns and artillery fire would always defeat infantry offensives. Rest intervals, frequent rotations of front-line battalions, and regular home furloughs were all used by Pétain to boost morale.

Analysis

The mutinies did not threaten a catastrophic military breakdown because the most persistent episodes of collective indiscipline involved a minimal number of French divisions. The French Army did not entirely recover until the early months of 1918, owing to low morale in more than half of the Army. The French high command was hesitant to launch another offensive because of the mutinies. J'attends les chars et les américains was Pétain's policy in late 1917, as he awaited the arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces and the introduction into battle of the new and very effective Renault FT tanks. Prime Minister Clemenceau backed him up, telling President Woodrow Wilson in June 1917 that France wanted to wait for the Americans and not lose any more time in the meanwhile. The French Army, according to Martin Evans, would sit tight and stay for the Americans.

Because the Americans were inexperienced when they arrived in France in spring 1917, US generals were told not to accept responsibility for military zones. The British were to be understudied by the US generals. This meant that during the summer and autumn of 1917, British troops had to reinforce and instruct American soldiers in the zones where the French had vanished. The British launched the Third Battle of Ypres to boost French morale, with varying degrees of success but significantly alleviating pressure on the French to the south. French confidence did not recover until early 1918 when the US forces had concluded their war preparations. The Allies held their position against the German spring offensive until November 1918, when the Hundred Days Offensive and Britain's naval blockade of Germany paid off. Germany crumbled on the home front due to a lack of food. As the troops and the front were soon driven back, their leadership was forced to sue for peace.

Historiography

To prevent alerting the Germans or damaging morale at home, the French government suppressed news of the mutinies. Guy Pedroncini published Les Mutineries de 1917 in 1967, which revealed the scope and ferocity of the uprisings for the first time. His endeavor was made possible by opening most of the military records fifty years after the events, following French War Ministry practice. There are still unreleased archives on the mutinies, which are thought to contain essentially political records; they will not be available to academics until 2017, 100 years after the revolts.

According to Leonard Smith, the mutinies were similar to labor strikes and may be regarded, at least in part, political. Soldiers sought more time off, better food, and a ban on colonial labor on the home front. They were likewise concerned about their families' well-being. According to Smith, the relatively mild repression was part of Pétain's conciliatory policy. At the same time, that policy preserved the appearance of total authority wielded by the French high command, the Grand Quartier Général. Finally, Smith examined the mutinies in their larger ideological framework, demonstrating how deeply French troops and mutineers had internalized Republican ideology's significant precepts.