The French army's rise paralleled that of the state it served. Fifteenth-century kings controlled French-recruited ‘bands’ of infantry and compagnies d'ordonnance of heavy cavalry, as well as foreign mercenaries. In 1483 the bandes de Picardie garrisoned the northern frontier, and were to become the Régiment de Picardie, senior regiment in the French line and, by its proud boast, the oldest in Christendom. During the 16th century a formal rank-structure solidified and more regiments were raised. Mercenary regiments—Swiss, German, Scots, Irish, and Italian—featured prominently in infantry and cavalry alike, and in the 1630s regiments of marine infantry were formed. In 1643 the French defeated the Spaniards at Rocroi in a battle which marked both the end of Spanish military supremacy and the French army's coming of age.
In the late 17th century the army developed to support the forward foreign policy of Louis XIV, under the tutelage of Louvois, his war administrator. It grew huge in wartime, at times exceeding half a million men. Captains ran their companies like commercial concerns, recruiting genuine volunteers, the duped, the dispossessed, and men pressed by the civil authorities. Desertion was endemic: when Marshal de Vivonne inspected the infantry on the 1677 Sicilian expedition he found that 4, 150 of the supposed 6, 900 were missing. Provincial militia battalions, raised in 1688 for home defence and recruited by ballot, soon became recruiting pools for the regular army.
Although Louis's wars made fortunes for contractors who supplied the army, there were concerns about the cost of war and the conduct of soldiers. Shortage of recruits encouraged reliance on mercenaries: in the 18th century 12 per cent of peacetime and 20 per cent of wartime strength were foreign-recruited. There were complaints that the ranks were filled by rootless men, and officer morale wavered because of low pay, slow promotion, and damaging defeats, notably in the ‘terrible year’ of 1757, when French armies were beaten in Germany and North America. Garrison life was tedious, and barracks became ‘honourable prisons’ where soldiers were packed together, monotonously fed and vulnerable to epidemics like that which killed half the Régiment de la Motte in 1722. Discharged soldiers often took to brigandage: in 1718 one formed a company of footpads which raided the roads between Paris and Caen. When he was arrested, 30 guardsmen, fearing that he would implicate them, deserted.
This poorly regarded army produced some outstanding leaders and redoubtable soldiers, and several developments had long-term importance. Tactics and organization were intelligently debated. There was a long-running dispute between the proponents of shallow infantry formations, configured primarily for fire, and deeper formations, intended for shock, and Guibert, one of the army's leading thinkers, eventually advocated a mixed order combining some of the benefits of both. Gribeauval, inspector-general of artillery, developed a family of standardized cannon, and French military engineers set the standards by which their profession was judged. The great Vauban had dominated engineering under Louis XIV. In the 18th century the engineers, trained in the school at Mézières, formed a professional corps whose efforts, in civil as well as military engineering, did much to strengthen the state.
Some writers hailed peasant citizen-soldiers—‘more sober, stronger, more used to work, and attached to their motherland because of the property they own there’—as the best recruits, but town-dwellers were over-represented in the army, making up about three-fifths of its strength. Many regarded the profession of arms as a career like any other, and were irritated by the poor regard in which their countrymen held them. ‘Dogs, loose women and soldiers not admitted’, warned signs at the entrance to public parks. Prussian customs were copied, and the soldier of the 1780s, strangled by straps and shoulder-belts, was repeatedly drilled in close order. The Comte de Saint-Germain, Louis XV's war minister, instituted reforms which ran squarely into some of those vested interests which bedevilled the last decades of the ancien régime. In an effort to improve the soldier's lot he replaced a variety of punishments by beating with the flat of the sword, only to discover that men regarded this as even more degrading. ‘Strike with the point, ’ complained one, ‘and that would do less harm’.
Officer recruitment posed particular problems. In 1751 the École Militaire Royale was established to train officers. In 1776 it was replaced by twelve provincial military schools, but was resuscitated in 1777. The officer corps contained both minor nobility—some of whom, like François de Chevert a foundling from Verdun who rose to the rank of general, had gained the gentlemanly particule through their own efforts—who hoped to make their way by the sword, and courtiers with no real interest in their profession. As the upper aristocracy strengthened its grip first on senior appointments, and then, with the Ségur edict of 1781, on commissioned rank itself, so the army contained more and more potentially disaffected junior officers, as well as NCOs whose hopes of promotion were blighted. Between 1781 and 1789 only 41 officers were commissioned from the ranks. One observer was to write that ‘The defection of the army was not one of the causes of the Revolution. It was the Revolution itself.’
In 1789 the army consisted of household troops, which included the French and Swiss guards, regular forces—around 113, 000 infantry, 32, 000 cavalry, and under 10, 000 gunners—and the militia of about 75, 000. French regiments were unreliable when faced with disturbances in Paris, and on 14 July, the day the Bastille fell, five of the six battalions of French guards joined the insurgents. Elsewhere troops often disobeyed orders to disperse rioters. Desertion rocketed, with many deserters joining the newly formed National Guard. Yet some regiments, especially German-speaking units from the eastern frontier, remained reliable. Many NCOs—now termed sous-offciers (under officers) rather than bas-officiers (lower officers) —sought promotion, but were anxious not to see a wholesale abolition of rank in which they too would suffer.
In 1790-1 there was conflict within the army, reflecting polarization in the regiments as well as pressure from local activists. Many officers fled abroad—about 6, 000 had left by the end of 1791—and soldiers continued to desert in droves, some joining national volunteer battalions, first raised in 1791, where prospects were better. All this was paralleled by political debate on the composition and role of the army, set against a background of internal unrest and, from April 1793, foreign war. Some argued that the army should simply be reformed, remaining a small, professional force. Others wished to see it transformed into a citizen army, whose members laid down the plough to take up the musket.
The Constituent Assembly recast regulations, reformed military justice, and threw commissioned rank open to both NCOs and patriotic outsiders. By 1792 emigration and desertion meant that most soldiers had joined the army since the Revolution, and only 4 per cent were now foreigners. Regiments lost their old titles and were numbered. Yet something of the old army's spirit still remained. When the 50th Regiment attacked at Jemappes in 1792 its men, remembering it as the Régiment de Navarre, shouted the old war-cry: ‘En avant, Navarre sans peur.’
In August 1793 the Convention decided that, instead of calling for volunteers and levying soldiers to meet specified targets, it would ‘requisition’ all fit males between 18 and 25, and decreed a levée en masse. This influx of citizen-soldiers, many of them active sans-culottes, intensified radicalism within the army, and many officers were expelled or guillotined. Along with sans-culotte politics came revolutionary tactics. The bayonet should be taken to the enemies of France; if bayonets were lacking, then the pike had been too long neglected. Prisoners risked being ‘sacrificed to the spirits of our unfortunate brothers who also had been killed without pity’.
That year the first great amalgamation replaced infantry regiments by demi-brigades, sweeping together white-coated regulars and blue-coated volunteers as battalions of old regiments were posted to different demi-brigades. Blue became the army's uniform colour, but the distinction between regular and volunteer lived on: a recruit is still called a ‘blue’. A divisional structure had already been introduced, with two brigades of infantry, a regiment of cavalry, and a detachment of artillery grouped together. This did not solve the problems faced by French generals during the French Revolutionary wars. Frequent inexperience, constant insecurity, political pressures—often reflected through representatives with the armies—and the patchy quality of troops all combined to make their task difficult. Tactics evolved as wilder sans-culotte notions were replaced by solid training which built on pre-war theory to develop use of both column and line, with tirailleurs skirmishing ahead to prepare the way for assaults which were sometimes delivered with a dash that the stately warriors of old Europe could not resist. The artillery had been less damaged by emigration than other arms, and its quality often told: at Valmy in 1792, after a sustained cannonade, the Duke of Brunswick decided not to attack the French position, a decision which probably cost him the war.
The levée en masse produced an army with a theoretical strength of almost 1, 200, 000, but its effective strength probably peaked at about 800, 000. In 1795 a second amalgamation restructured the infantry again. In 1798 ‘requisition’ was replaced by conscription, for four years in peacetime and an unlimited period in wartime. Although the proportion of old soldiers had now fallen to a mere 3.3 per cent, the army of 1798 was in general well trained, much better disciplined than in the recent past, and the young Bonaparte's stunning 1796 Italian campaign had shown what it could achieve.
Napoleon's army was built on these foundations. He maintained it through conscription, whose burden became increasingly resented, especially after 1812. In all some two million men were conscripted between 1800 and 1814. There were often more than 50, 000 refractory conscripts and deserters, and more than half the conscripts from some southern départements declined to report for duty. Foreign troops made up about a third of French strength after 1809. The term régiment was revived in 1803, and Napoleon was careful to nurture martial spirit by the institution of the Légion d'Honneur, spectacular military ceremonies, and a system of emulation which established the Imperial Guard, itself eventually divided into Old, Middle, and Young, as the apogee of the army. The emperor's fierce energy enabled him to deal with much routine administration himself, and his war ministers were little more than his instruments.
At its best the imperial army had few equals, and the Austerlitz campaign of 1806 and the Jena/Auerstadt campaign a year later combined patriotic fervour, solid experience, and inspirational leadership. It was worn down by a long war, in which the ‘Spanish ulcer’ (see Peninsular war) played an enervating part. It remained dependent on its master's fragile genius, and suffered from the fact that few of Napoleon's marshals had real talents for independent command. Although Napoleon was able to return from exile to fight the campaign of the Hundred Days that culminated in Waterloo, by 1815 France was war-weary and convinced that military glory had been bought at too dear a price.
The restored Bourbons brought with them the military baggage of the old regime. The army was reduced to little more than 100, 000 men, and many Napoleonic officers found themselves on half pay, their places taken by returned émigrés. Infantry regiments, briefly replaced by departmental legions, were still recruited by conscription. In the 1830 Revolution the army offered little support to the Restoration monarchy, and with Louis Philippe on the throne there was the familiar scramble for promotions. The Loi Soult of 1832 decreed that at least half the army's second lieutenants should be commissioned from the ranks. The others were to come from military academies, Saint-Cyr for the infantry and cavalry and the École Polytechnique for gunners and sappers. In practice this minimum was exceeded, and although ranker officers generally rose no higher than captain they included at least one marshal, the unfortunate Bazaine.
The same law refined conscription, dividing the annual contingent of conscripts into two parts. The first, its members selected by lot, served for seven years with the colours: the second formed an untrained reserve. Those who could afford it paid a replacement to serve on their behalf. The law of 1855 made slight modifications, and it was not until 1868 that the Loi Niel, passed in the aftermath of Prussian victory in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, attempted to introduce something approaching universal conscription.
The army created by the Loi Soult had many virtues. It was tough and, with frequent fighting in Algeria and the Italian, Crimean, and Mexican campaigns, experienced. It met the strategic requirements of France at a time when wars of national survival were perceived to be rare, and frontier fortresses were expected to buy time to raise fresh troops. It also met the political remit of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, to which many of its officers gave their personal support, for its long-service soldiers, imbued with esprit militaire, would be likely to defend the regime against its internal enemies.
French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 was a reflection of these flawed assumptions. Although the army of the Second Empire had the chassepot breech-loader and the mitrailleuse machine gun, it was essentially an expeditionary, not a European, army, and its attempts to muddle through cost it dear in the age of the railway and national armies. The Armies of National Defence, which kept the field after the defeat of the imperial armies, pointed the way ahead.
The suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 reinforced the Left's suspicions of the army. As Alistair Horne was to write: ‘A deep trench had been dug between the bourgeoisie and the masses, between the professional army and the Left, which would stretch on into the far distance’. Yet the years after the Franco-Prussian war were the army's Golden Age. A clear sense of national purpose, inspired by determination to expunge the stain of 1870-1 and recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, permitted the introduction of universal conscription in 1872-5. Old military families rediscovered the profession of arms. There was a clear understanding that the army must be kept out of politics. A general staff was created, with a Conseil Supérieure de la Guerre and, from 1890, an army CGS. The staff busied itself with perfecting a peacetime organization which meshed closely with the demands of war, so that the chaos of 1870 could never be repeated. Regiments were given fixed garrisons and grew local roots: the 39th hailed from Rouen, the 41st from Rennes, and the 110th from Dunkirk. Weapons and equipment were comprehensively transformed, and in the new 75 mm French gunners had a weapon which set the standard for field artillery.
The honeymoon did not last. The Dreyfus affair, which broke in 1894, split the nation. The army found itself used increasingly against strikes and riots, being pilloried by the Left, and sometimes finding the strain on its loyalty too much to bear: the 100th Regiment mutinied in sympathy with rioters in 1907. In a misguided effort to nurture officers who could be relied upon ‘because of their Republican sentiments’, the war minister, Gen André, kept secret files which specified political and religious sympathies: the future Marshal Foch found his promotion delayed because his brother was a Jesuit. Promotion was slow: an officer might remain a lieutenant for twelve to fifteen years and a captain for fifteen to twenty. While bureaucracy and inertia ruled in metropolitan France, service in the colonies offered challenge and responsibility, providing a shaft of light which helped illuminate the army even in its darkest days.
Yet when war came in 1914 the army rose to the challenge. Mobilization was slick and popular support for the war—despite deep reservations, especially in the countryside—was robust. There had been something of a national revival already, with the philosopher Henri Bergson expounding the concept of l'élan vital and the novelist Ernest Psichari demanding ‘a proud and violent army’. The regulations of 1913 proclaimed: ‘The French army, returning to its traditions, recognizes no law save that of the offensive.’ Michael Howard has observed that, allowing for Gallic bravura, one finds the same sentiments expressed by British and German writers of the period. Douglas Porch suggests that it was precisely because the French army was so riven by strife that it adopted such a simple-minded doctrine: anything more complex was beyond it.
The results of Plan XVII, the all-out offensive into the lost provinces, were catastrophic. The army lost 300, 000 men and almost 5, 000 officers in a fortnight, and, but for the stolid imperturbability of Joffre, its C-in-C, might easily have lost the war too. For the next eighteen months he mounted repeated offensives, with British help, which produced mounting casualties, leading a general to complain that ‘The instrument of victory is being broken in our hands.’ By the end of 1915 France had lost half her regular officers and her dead totalled almost what Britain and her dominions were to lose in the whole war. The fighting at Verdun imposed its own terrible burden, and by the end of 1916 the army was worn to a thread. Its trench newspapers testify to the plight of soldiers who endured harsh conditions, monotonous food, and irregular leave. Many of the best officers had fallen, and their replacements were sometimes more conscious of privilege than duty. Hatred of the embusqué—the shirker with a comfortable job and another man's wife—reflected barriers which made many soldiers feel strangers in their own land.
The Nivelle offensive of April 1917 had been oversold as a war-winning master stroke, and its failure stirred deep-seated discontent into open mutiny. Much of the army was touched, to a greater or lesser extent, by unrest, but this was not (as military and political leaders feared) the result of a well-organized revolutionary agitation, but rather the response of citizen soldiers to an intolerable situation. Officers might be jostled—even then rarely by their own men—but they were not murdered. Pétain, who succeeded the disgraced Nivelle, restored morale by a judicious mixture of firmness and attention to justified demands.
Although the Union Sacrée, the patriotic compact between political parties, had managed to survive, there was repeated friction among politicians, and between politicians and soldiers. In November 1917 Clemenceau became premier. His Jacobin suspicions of the military made him an uncomfortable master, but his remorseless insistence on winning the war gave Foch, appointed supreme Allied commander during the German spring offensive of 1918, the firm support he required. In November 1918 Pres Poincaré entered Metz, capital of Lorraine, with Clemenceau and Foch. He wrote in his diary: ‘A day of sovereign beauty. Now I can die.’
It was the army that died. The euphoria of victory proved short-lived, and France found that the world did not recognize its balance of moral credit. French losses, proportionately heavier than German, affected the birth rate to produce ‘hollow years’ for recruiting in the 1930s. Inflation and unemployment seemed a poor reward for sacrifice, and with the lost provinces regained there seemed no logic in paying for defence. Some officers flirted with fascism, and the Left opposed suggestions that new weapons demanded a smaller, professional, mechanized army. Weygand, at the head of the army until his retirement in 1935, clashed repeatedly with what he saw as an anti-military government. The Maginot Line was built to defend much of the Franco-German border, but stopped short in the north. It was not as foolish as is sometimes suggested, but it depended on adequate mobile troops, and it brought with it a ‘Maginot mentality’ which helped persuade Frenchmen that invasion was impossible.
The French army which went to war in 1939 was marked by all the strains of the inter-war years. It had some good equipment, but lacked comprehensive doctrine. Morale was patchy, and tension between officers and men reflected the distrust of many officers, regular and reserve, for socialism. Defeat in 1940 reflected a failure of command, doctrine, and above all morale. There were some flickers of the old glory: French soldiers gave a much better account of themselves during the second phase of the campaign, when the Germans struck southwards, and against an opportunistic attack from Italy, than historians sometimes recognize.
Defeat split the army. De Gaulle urged his countrymen to fight on, and Free French soldiers fought in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, and eventually France itself. But the 84-year-old Marshal Pétain, head of the French state controlled from the little spa of Vichy, represented stability and continuity, and the soldiers who remained loyal to him were neither fools nor villains. The line of duty was sometimes far from clear. When the Allies invaded French North Africa in November 1942 some Frenchmen fought against them, and when the Germans moved into the Unoccupied Zone of France the same month at least one French general, de Lattre de Tassigny, disobeyed the government's orders and resisted them.
The post-war army had to cope with the tensions between soldiers who had followed different paths during the war, and did so during the long withdrawal from empire, at a time when military pay and prestige fell. Conscripts were not sent to Indochina, and the fighting there bore down hard on regulars who felt that they were waging a dirty war without popular support. Defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the experience of the prison camps which followed it politicized many officers, helping to crystallize the guerre revolutionnaire doctrine. The army then sought to apply this in Algeria, so much closer to home and, partly because of the troops it had provided since the 1830s, so close to the army's heart. The legacy of 1940 bore bitter fruit. Some officers, critical of political leadership and alienated from a society which neither understood nor appreciated their efforts, took direct action. There were military coups in Algeria in 1958 and 1961 (see Algerian independence war), and French withdrawal in 1962 was followed by a terrorist campaign in France itself.
The tensions of Algeria lingered on in an army which was incorporated in a defence policy based on the principle of ‘Tous Azimuts’—enemies might come from all points of the compass, not just the east—as France withdrew from NATO's command structure. An independent nuclear deterrent, the Force de Frappe, was a prestigious symbol of this new policy. Some traditional frictions remained. On the one hand there were fears that conscripts might be infected by the revolutionary fervour of 1968, and on the other concerns about the officer corps' reaction to the Mitterrand government of 1981. Demands for the abolition of conscription were reinforced by the government's preference for using regulars for intervention operations in former colonies in Africa and, on a larger scale, in the Gulf war.
In the 1990s France moved closer to NATO, partly because of shared experience on operations in (former) Yugoslavia, and in 1996 took the controversial decision to abolish conscription. A restructuring programme will downscale an army of 239, 000 service personnel in 1996 to 136, 000 in 2015. This will involve reducing the number of professional officers and NCOs but recruiting many more professional soldiers, who will require both an attractive careeer and the prospect of subsequent resettlement; the civilianization of many posts; and the creation of a small volunteer reserve. The reorganization will be governed by three principles: modularity, so that forces can be packaged to meet specific circumstances; economy of force, brought about by reduction in size; and clear separation between the operational chain of command (operational headquarters and projectable units) and the organic chain of command (basic training and administrative support). Many officers who welcome the abolition of conscription on military grounds retain doubts about its wider wisdom, fearing that France and her army might grow apart. If history tells us anything, it is that armies demand popular support: the real challenge facing the French army will be to retain this beyond the millennium.
Bibliography
- Corvisier, André (ed.), Histoire militaire de la France,
4 vols. (Paris 1992-4). - Gorce, Paul-Marie de la, The French Army: A Military-Political History (New York, 1963).
- Griffith, P. G., Military Thought in the French Army 1815-1851 (Manchester, 1979).
- Horne, Alistair, The French Army and Politics 1870-1970 (London, 1984).
- Howard, Michael, ‘Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (Oxford, 1986).
- Porch, Douglas, The March to the Marne (Cambridge, 1981)
— Richard Holmes
