Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I

by Leonard V. Smith

Overview

Literary and historical conventions have long painted the experience of soldiers during World War I as simple victimization. Leonard Smith, however, argues that a complex dialogue of resistance and negotiation existed between French soldiers and their own commanders. In this case study of wartime military culture, Smith analyzes the experience of the French Fifth Infantry Division in both pitched battle and trench warfare. The division established a distinguished fighting record from 1914 to 1916, yet proved in 1917 the most mutinous division in the entire French army, only to regain its elite reputation in 1918. Drawing on sources from ordinary soldiers to well-known commanders such as General Charles Mangin, the author explains how the mutinies of 1917 became an explicit manifestation of an implicit struggle that took place within the French army over the whole course of the war.

Smith pays particular attention to the pivotal role of noncommissioned and junior officers, who both exercised command authority and shared the physical perils of men in the lower ranks. He shows that "soldiers," broadly defined, learned to determine rules of how they would and would not fight the war, and imposed these rules on the command structure itself. By altering the parameters of command authority in accordance with their own perceived interests, soldiers and commanders negotiated a behavioral space between mutiny and obedience.

Originally published in 1994.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691601731
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #225
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

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Between Mutiny and Obedience

The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War I

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By Leonard V. Smith

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03304-4

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

THE THEORY OF WAR, OBEDIENCE, AND MILITARY AUTHORITY

War has generally been conceived as an intensely hierarchical activity, thought out and organized from above, and executed (however imperfectly) from below. Religious and secular formulations of the theory of war have maintained that calculation—such as a prudential assessment of the good versus the evil brought about by war or in modern utilitarian parlance the cost versus the benefit—separate war from asocial or animalistic violence. Since people will make different calculations about war and all calculations cannot be treated equally lest chaos ensue, obedience to hierarchy has been taken as a given, concerning both how wars are carried out and how they are understood historically.

This book interrogates the notion of obedience, first at a broad theoretical level and then at a very specific empirical level. This introductory chapter provides the conceptual framework and argument. The first two sections will briefly illustrate some of the ways in which military authority has come to be understood in the theory of war as a unilateral exercise of power from above. The norm of obedience to authority, I will suggest, did not change substantially with secularization. Absolute divine authority in the medieval period was replaced by absolute "natural" authority in the early modern period, which was in turn replaced by absolute "political" authority in the nineteenth century. In the final two sections of the chapter, I will propose an alternative model of military command authority and explain how that model will function in the remainder of the book.

OBEDIENCE TO GOD AND NATURE: THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIODS

The religious formulation of the theory of war is most commonly known as Just War theory (in Latin ius belli). Directly in the medieval period and indirectly in the early modern period, the ius belli were considered to have come from a divine and hence absolute source—God. Killing, of course, had been a sin ever since Cain slew Abel. Yet God Himself had authorized killing in a host of other biblical episodes, such as the conquest of Canaan under Joshua. But even in the Bible, God's absolute authority always reached the soldier through human and hence imperfect temporal leaders. The biblical record amply demonstrated to Jews and Christians that not all kings of Israel fought just wars.

Just War theory as currently understood has two main components, the ius ad bellum (the right to go to war) and the ius in bello (lawful behavior in the conduct of a war). The ius in bello comprises two concepts, discrimination and proportionality. Both respond to the moral stipulation that the good brought about by war must outweigh the evil or harm. Discrimination prescribes immunity from violence for noncombatants, such as civilians, prisoners of war, or wounded combatants. Proportionality limits the types of weapons that may be used in war and specifies the conditions under which the allowed weapons may be used. Both discrimination and proportionality are supposed to limit the use of violence to the minimum level necessary to achieve the objectives of the war. A secularized and utilitarian formulation of proportionality will be proposed later as a basic principle in the argument of this book.

Alongside its aversion to killing, Judeo-Christian tradition has stressed obedience to temporal authority. The key question for soldiers in Just War theory thus has been the nature of their moral duty if their superiors ordered a use of violence soldiers considered unjust, in either a ius ad bellum or a ius in bello sense. How could the soldier judge correctly between the good of obedience and the evil of unjust killing?

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.) believed war to be the inevitable consequence of humanity's inherently sinful nature in the fallen state in the earthly city. Certain wrongs could indeed be righted by violence, though a war could be just only if it were waged to bring peace. The evil of destruction must not exceed its just proportion to the good it promotes or makes possible. In City of God, Augustine had a simple but drastic solution to the problem of obedience. Sadly but inevitably, all human judgment remains clouded by sin in the earthly city. Christians must fulfill their social obligations, even if they unintentionally commit unjust acts along the way. Temporal leaders are accountable to God for discharging these obligations; soldiers are accountable to their commanders. This meant unquestioning obedience to commands, whether the commands themselves were just or not: "For when a soldier kills a man in obedience to the legitimate authority under which he has served, he is not chargeable with murder by the laws of his country; in fact, he is chargeable with insubordination and mutiny if he refuses." According to the Augustinian solution, obedience takes precedence over individual conscience in a temporal world full of corruption and error.

As the decaying Roman Empire of Augustine's day came to an end, authority came to be administered through complicated and flexible oaths of fealty to individuals rather than to an abstract state. Throughout the Middle Ages, Augustine's formula of the primacy of the Christian soldier's duty to obey was weakened, but never really abandoned. Most medieval theorists agreed with canonist Gratian, who wrote in the middle of the twelfth century that the Christian was obliged to obey except when obedience unambiguously put that soldier's soul in jeopardy.

The secularization of Just War theory began with the reintroduction of Aristotelian political theory, particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In a radical departure from Augustine, Aquinas concluded that earthly affairs were governed according to natural law, which was consistent with God's eternal and divine law, but unlike them was comprehensible on the basis of human reason alone. "Every act of reason," he wrote, "is based on principles that are known naturally...." Temporal authority, then, exists to serve "rational" or "natural" ends, specifically the Aristotelian end of the common good. To Aquinas, the "natural" was both morally good and realizable, despite human frailties in calculation and judgment. Humanity, or at least temporal leaders, could become principally and directly responsible for all human activities, including war.

In the early modern period, an expansive notion—the "natural" right of self-defense—became the principal justification for fighting a war. Most theorists stopped short of Niccolò Machiavelli's sweeping and completely secular assertion in The Prince (1514) that war was just whenever and however the prince deemed it essential to the security of the state. The Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) concluded that indigenous peoples in the Americas who "attacked" Christians in the New World attempting peacefully to spread their religion could justly be punished by war according to natural law. Another Spaniard, the Jesuit Francisco Suàrez (1548–1617) approved of internal coercion of religious practice to ensure the "natural" unity of the state.

At first glance, regulating war by natural law could not be more straightforward. Natural law, sovereign in worldly affairs and fully knowable by human reason, was nevertheless perfect because it emanated directly from God. Accordingly, all calculations about war were theoretically subject to the same ostensibly objective criteria. Yet given the diversity of human reasoning, the question thus persisted of the subject's duty in the event of an incorrect (and hence unjust) calculation on the part of the sovereign. Both Vitoria and Suàrez advised the sovereign to take the well-reasoned counsel of notables, though the ultimate responsibility for the war remained with the sovereign. Notables as well as commoners were obliged to obey unless their souls were manifestly imperiled, much as had been the case with medieval theory.

But there existed within natural law the basis for rethinking this solution. Basing political society on natural law increased human responsibility for temporal affairs, and more specifically human responsibility for determining the common good. Not surprisingly, this posed the question of with whom and under what circumstances this responsibility lay. This, in turn, raised the question of the natural relationship between the "natural" sovereign authority and those over whom it ruled.

The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) posited that sovereigns ought to make public their reasons for going to war, and thus subject to the reflection and judgment of all subjects. If those subjects concluded that the war was unjust, they were obliged to abstain on natural (as opposed to theological) grounds. John Locke (1632–1704) carried the notion of just disobedience on secular grounds even further. For Locke, temporal authority existed as a contract, in which individuals in political society surrendered their natural right of self-defense to the sovereign. A sovereign who misused this authority through an internal or external unjust war broke the contract. Accordingly, the subject in such a situation could not only justly refuse to take part in the war, but could overthrow the sovereign.

But Locke and other early modern theorists concerned themselves only with political society. The right to participate remained strictly circumscribed by rank and property. Political society pointedly excluded most soldiers in the field, who certainly lacked the right of resistance to officers, who served as the extension of the sovereign's authority. The social role of the soldier in an ancien régime army corresponded to that of the politically excluded urban and rural poor, the classes from which most soldiers originated. Secular authority expected absolute obedience on the battlefield, with serious infractions punishable by instant death. But with the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, a situation emerged in which the borders of the political community began to expand, with dramatic consequences for both the practice and the theory of war.

CLAUSEWITZ: OBEDIENCE TO "POLITICS"

The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 sought to put into practice in France a new definition of the "natural" relationship between rulers and the ruled. This definition involved popular sovereignty, which argued that legitimate political authority existed in the collectivity of freeborn citizens rather than in the monarch. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau had posited in The Social Contract (1762), popular sovereignty sought to reconcile obedience and freedom by making each citizen the author as well as the subject of political power: "Each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before."

When France went to war to defend popular sovereignty in 1792, the new theory of political authority made possible a new practice of warfare. Defending the patrie became every male citizen's first and foremost duty to the collectivity. This made possible a higher degree of national mobilization than had ever been the case in European history. Citizen-soldiers were still expected to obey their commanders. But they were now told that obeying authority was in a sense obeying themselves, since they and their compatriots made up the collective body in which sovereignty lay. As Jean-Paul Bertaud, John Lynn, and others have convincingly argued, Revolutionary ideology remained critical in the conscription, training, and fighting of the French army, even as it reprofessionalized in the years after the levée en masse of 1793.

After the final defeat of the French by a coalition of dynastic forces in 1815, a Prussian staff officer, Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) set about rethinking the theory of war in light of the altered practice of war. Clausewitz's masterpiece, On War, was published one year after his death. Like many in the German elite of his day, Clausewitz had divided sentiments about the French Revolution and its terrible genius, Napoleon Bonaparte. As Peter Paret put it, "Clausewitz's sarcastic comments on the self-proclaimed saviour of humanity in Paris went hand in hand with admiration for the energies they generated."

Ancien régime armies epitomized the underlying weakness of the dynastic states before 1789. Clausewitz maintained that in the pre-Revolutionary dynastic state, the army had been allowed to exist as an end in itself, "to form a state within a state, in which violence gradually disappeared." The Revolution and Bonaparte had "purified" war by erasing the artificial barriers between military and civilian society, thus making possible a truly "national" war. As he observed:

Since Bonaparte, then, war, first among the French and subsequently among their enemies, again became the concern of the people as a whole, war took on an entirely different character, or rather closely approached its true character, its absolute perfection. There seemed no end to the resources mobilized; all limits disappeared in the vigor and enthusiasm shown by governments and their subjects.

The dynastic powers defeated Napoleon, Clausewitz concluded, only when they learned to copy the French secret of national war—first in Spain in 1807, then in Austria in 1809, in 1812 in Russia, and finally in 1813 in Germany. In On War, Clausewitz sought to establish a new theory of war that the dynastic powers could use to prevail against any latter-day versions of Napoleon that revolutions might produce in the future.

Clausewitz's divided sentiments on the French Revolution are reflected in his rethinking of the theory of war in ways whose historical significance can scarcely be exaggerated. On the one hand, Clausewitz eagerly embraced the rationalism of the Revolution. This meant nothing less than a radical completion of the secularization of the theory of war. Since the writing of the biblical texts, calculations behind war had been accountable to some fixed and absolute source of authority—first to God and then to "nature" under natural law, which had been given by God.

Clausewitz eliminated the problem of human calculations falling short of ideals provided by God or nature by changing the entire equation. He maintained that war was in itself a conceptual constant, defined simply as "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." As a result, there was no reason intrinsic to war for limiting it in any way. Proportionality, the limiting of war for any moral reason, whether based in divine or natural law, represented for Clausewitz nothing more than a kind-hearted fantasy.

The control of war by some fixed and absolute morality, however imperfectly interpreted by the human beings implementing it, was replaced by a variable—politics. From this comes Clausewitz's most famous statement, that war is "a true political instrument, the continuation of political activity by other means." Military figures of whatever rank serve simply as state instruments bearing arms. The soldier became a total professional analagous to a civil bureaucrat, responsible only for executing orders but relieved from autonomous moral judgment regarding them. War differs from administration only by its use of physical violence: "What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means. War in general, and the commander in any specific instance, is entitled to require that the trend and designs of policy shall not be inconsistent with these means."

War itself thus becomes a policy tool totally predictable in its function and results. From the interaction of the constant (war) and the variable (politics) comes Clausewitz's often cited but misunderstood distinction between total and limited war. Any correctly calculated war has a predetermined end (Zweck) that can be achieved using the available means (Mittel), through a series of intermediary stages (Ziele). At any given stage, be it the taking of a bridge, a cavalry assault, or a siege, there is no logical reason to constrain violence in any way. Violence in war is always total; only the political Zweck can properly be limited.

But on the other hand, even as Clausewitz embraced the rationalism and secularism of the French Revolution, he adamantly refused to concede that revolutionary ideology had played a significant role in creating the French war machine. For him, the Revolution had swept away the decadent and feeble royal army but Napoleon had succeeded as a new monarch rather than as the heir to the Revolution. According to Clausewitz's ideal, armed forces, as pure instruments of state, could not have political identities of their own—certainly not identities having anything to do with popular sovereignty.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Between Mutiny and Obedience by Leonard V. Smith. Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Preface

I Introduction: The Theory of War, Obedience, and Military Authority

II The Army and the Republic in Provincial France: Military Life in Rouen before August 1914

III The Battles of August-September 1914: The Pieces of Defeat, Victory, and Proportionality

IV The New 5[superscript e] DI and the New War: The Social World of Trench Warfare

V From Percee to Grignotage: The 1915 Offensives at Neuville-St. Vaast

VI The Crisis in Pitched Battle: Verdun, 1916

VII The Crisis in Trench Warfare: Les Eparges

VIII The Implicit Struggle Becomes Explicit: The Mutinies of 1917

IX The Grandeur and Miseries of Proportionality: June 1917-November 1918

X Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is a serious book by a hard-working young historian on an important subject. It contains much good material, and it is particularly good at separating the combat experience into its components, distinguishing between the formal offensive, ... routine trench warfare, ... and its small events, such as patrols and raids, of which he provides some highly original narratives. It is excellent on the aetiology of the mutinies and often fascinating on the forms they took. The accounts of the exchanges between soldiers and officers ring with authenticity."

Times Literary Supplement

"This is a serious book by a hard-working young historian on an important subject. It contains much good material, and it is particularly good at separating the combat experience into its components, distinguishing between the formal offensive, ... routine trench warfare, ... and its small events, such as patrols and raids, of which he provides some highly original narratives. It is excellent on the aetiology of the mutinies and often fascinating on the forms they took. The accounts of the exchanges between soldiers and officers ring with authenticity."—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher