mutiny

[Obsolete mutine, from Old French mutin, rebellious, from muete, revolt, from Vulgar Latin *movita, from Latin movēre, to move. See move.]

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noun

Organized opposition intended to change or overthrow existing authority: insurgence, insurgency, insurrection, rebellion, revolt, revolution, sedition, uprising. See resist/yield.

verb

To refuse allegiance to and oppose by force a government or ruling authority: rebel, revolt, rise (up). See resist/yield.

Definition: defiance, resistance
Antonyms: obedience, subservience

v

Definition: defy, revolt
Antonyms: obey, observe, serve, subject

Mutinies ‘Any army’, wrote Richard Watt, ‘is but a flicker away from becoming an armed gang. The only thing that prevents this is military discipline, which is actually an incredibly flimsy institution, if its subjects but knew it.’ Mutinies happen when discontented soldiers collectively challenge discipline, usually with considerable awareness of its flimsiness. Just how and why mutinies occur has been subject to considerable change over time. But at the heart of any mutiny is the relationship between the acts of collective disobedience and the military and political authority structures around it. The demands of mutineers have often been quite specific and more practical than explicitly ideological—complaints over food, pay, leaves, officers, disputes over regulations of various sorts. But any mutiny by definition involves a challenge to one of the most fundamental institutions of state, the army. No mutiny, therefore, is completely ‘non-political’, in that no army can ignore the fact that it is simply an instrument of political power. Mutinies could and regularly did disrupt the functions of state policy when the armies were small, but once mass conscript armies of citizen-soldiers replaced armies of mercenaries and long-term volunteers drawn from society's outcasts, mutinies became more ‘political’ still.

Under the old regime, Watt's adage was an open secret and soldiers for hire were notoriously unreliable. By definition, they served who paid them. Their officers might endeavour to put down mutinies or might help lead them, depending on how they perceived their own interests. The practice of provisioning and housing soldiers ‘off the land’ led to a brutal approach to campaigning that once unleashed was not easily controlled. Unstable armies made for unstable policy. Mutinies among the Spanish forces during the Netherlands revolt from 1573 to 1576 exposed the weakness of the Spanish state and of the Spanish imperial enterprise itself. Mercenaries employed by Spain had one eminently practical demand, and their mutinies could be considered a particularly violent form of strike because Spanish units were often two to three years behind in pay, with some light cavalry units claiming as many as six years' arrears. The estimated cost of maintaining the campaign in the Netherlands was 1.2 million florins/month, yet the military treasury received only one-quarter that amount from Spain. The deficit, it was presumed, would be covered by collections from the local populace in the form of taxes, loans (forced or otherwise), and simple plunder. On top of this, administrative incoherence and systemic corruption made it impossible to determine precisely what was spent where. A 1574 mutiny in Antwerp was settled along lines recognizable to labour negotiators in modern times, by splitting the difference. The crown agreed to pay half of the mutineers' demands, in exchange for an admission on the part of the soldiers that they had already extracted the other half one way or another from the countryside. Yet this sort of resolution helped give the Spanish the worst of all worlds: an empty treasury, a sullen and rapacious army, and an enraged populace in the Netherlands.

The ever-present potential for mutiny on the part of mercenary armies led European powers to develop professional armies staffed by long-term volunteers. While this made some forms of mutiny much more manageable, it also created the sort of remote and professionalized military society that Clausewitz warned about after the French Revolutionary wars. Although it emerged from the East India company's military subculture, the Indian Mutiny could not possibly be construed as simply a strike. The rebellious sepoys directly challenged imperial rule based on the deepest beliefs of local peoples and many believe that the war it sparked marks the first emergence of a sense of Indian nationalism that transcended local identities. The imposition of direct rule from London certainly marks the beginning of an Indian army as opposed to the various company divisions under which it was previously organized, and this has remained a unifying institution in a fragmented and vastly diverse land.

In the 20th century, mutiny had its most profound political impact during WW I. Between 1914 and 1918, the theoretically irresistible force of military discipline ran up against the immovable object of the stalemated war of the trenches. All of the major European protagonists suffered some form of major military crisis attributable at least in part to temporary or permanent collapses of morale. Military collapse as a form of ‘hidden mutiny’ occurred in the Italian army at Caporetto in November 1917, the British army in March 1918, and in the German and Habsburg armies in the autumn of 1918. Open mutiny occurred in the imperial Russian army in February 1917, the French army in May and June 1917, and in the German navy in the autumn of 1918. Mutiny, in short, helped shape the outcome of the war.

In May and June 1917, in the wake of the failed Nivelle offensive along the Chemin des Dames, constituent units of about half of the divisions in the French army refused at one point or another to take up positions in the front lines. Guy Pedroncini provided the classic ‘military’ explanation of the mutinies, and placed Gen Philippe Pétain at the centre of resolving them. Pétain, according to Pedroncini, repaired the French military effort through particular reforms in leave and food policy and, most importantly, through tacitly agreeing not to initiate any more general offensives until tanks and American reinforcements gave France an unquestionable military superiority. The soldiers, according to Pedroncini, had wanted nothing more all along. Some historians have identified this mutiny as a form of strike, a matter of soldiers temporarily downing tools for less horrible working conditions. Soldiers, according to this point of view, brought with them to the front practices of protests learned from the civilian workplace. Other historians dispute this, on the principles that soldiers are not workers and that war is not production, quite the reverse. Most strikes have established scripts and all of the protagonists know that the strikers will return to work eventually. This, indeed, was the underlying assumption even of the mutineers of Antwerp in 1574. But, some historians argue, such an assumption cannot be made when citizen-soldiers, whose personal morale and commitment to the struggle is essential to the waging of modern total war, challenge such a fundamental institution of state so directly.

An alternative explanation focuses on the particular dynamic of the mutinies and on the political identity of French soldiers as framed by the Third Republic. Pétain, and the senior command in general, are seen more as responding to a political situation fundamentally determined from below. The moment of explicit defiance of command authority came most often at railway depots or other embarkation points. Groups of soldiers would refuse point-blank to advance into the front lines, and would hold anti-war demonstrations instead. Initially, and from Pétain down, the French high command chose not to confront the demonstrators directly. At no point did the command structure have enough reliable troops to hand to repress the mutinies by force, even if it had chosen to. In the absence of external coercion, only internal suasion kept the mutinies from going further than they did.

According to this point of view, the French army mutinies are best understood in the context of soldiers working out two paradoxical components of their identity as citizen-soldiers: direct democracy and representative government. Direct democracy authorized resistance and wide-ranging political expression, as it had in the many French revolutions since 1789. Relatively mundane demands for better food and a more fair leave policy existed alongside demands for an immediate peace and for ‘liberty’. Soldiers' demands were riddled with curious inconsistencies, such as the fact that immediate peace would have made a more fair leave policy irrelevant. Yet the demands of the soldiers also showed the importance to them of representative government. Soldiers demanded that their commanders tell their representatives in the Chambers of Deputies of their plight. The significance of soldiers asserting their identities as citizens can scarcely be exaggerated. In doing so, they affirmed the basic legitimacy of republican institutions, and of the deputies representing them. The Third Republic as a representative democracy existed in each of them, and informed their very conception of what power and politics were all about. The Third Republic demarcated the boundaries of the mutineers' political imagination. Republican identity carried within it the means of its own internal coercion. It authorized obedience as well as mutiny.

In its outcome, the contrast with the mutinies of 1917 in the imperial Russian army could not be more stark. The tsar's soldiers of August 1914 brought with them two ancient and often conflicting images of authority. Soldiers came overwhelmingly from the countryside, where they grew up in the confined power relationship between peasant and landlord. Obedience in the tsar's army was a replication of this relationship, with the officer replacing the landowner. The officer's authority was as irresistible as it was capricious; the soldier could only submit and hope for better, most probably in the next world. Against this image of authority lay that of the tsar, the very good but very mysterious ‘little father’ of his peoples, who had his will constantly thwarted by the likes of landlords and officers, those who exercised immediate authority. Little change occurred through reformist efforts over the course of the 19th century to motivate soldiers along ‘modern’ lines by giving them some sort of otherwise unobtainable civil status. In the revolution of 1905-6, soldiers had mutinied one day and repressed workers' strikes the next, depending on which ancient image of authority they thought the stronger. Imperial Russian soldiers entered the war fundamentally unincorporated into any national community as westerners understood it.

In Russia, the old-regime conception of political identity proved ill-suited to a protracted and total war of nation states. Tsar Nicholas II made a bad situation worse in 1915, when he assumed personal command of his armies. In so doing, he nailed the flag of his autocracy to the tottering mast of Russian military performance. The ‘little father’ became very real and very fallible, as Nicholas undercut the mystical distance so important to his own legitimacy. The result was a mutiny that invoked the demise of the monarchy. External coercion ceased to exist as the Tsar's regime collapsed. The issue became putting into place the means of internal suasion.

Despite a generally deteriorating military situation, mutiny in the Russian army had no connection to any particular calamity on the battlefield. Rather, it was provoked by a subsistence crisis in the large cities of the interior. Nicholas precipitated the disintegration of his own authority at the end of February 1917, when he ordered garrison units to fire on the civilian population to end the foot riots. He could scarcely have chosen a more volatile situation or a less reliable instrument. Urban garrisons comprised two varieties of soldiers: recuperating wounded veterans and semi-trained recruits. Both could be counted on to have more immediate links to the suffering people in the interior than to those ordering them to shoot. The garrisons refused wholesale to fire on the crowds, provoking a crisis that in a matter of days led to the tsar's abdication.

With the collapse of the regime and the systemic question of authority within the army that followed, soldiers ceased to have any clear notion of what or to whom they were loyal. Whoever could remobilize soldiers' military and civilian identities would stand a good chance of gaining power in Russia. Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government, was a superbly educated ‘European’ Russian. As such, he had in mind the image of the French armies of the Year II of the French Revolution. In 1793-4, the Revolution had called into being the most impressive military machine the world had ever seen. Kerensky tried to make history repeat itself by transforming the tsarist soldier into the citizen-soldier of an emerging Russian republic in a matter of months. His effort collapsed in part because an alternative source of authority emerged within the army more or less simultaneously to that of the provisional government—the soldiers' councils, more commonly known as soviets. The soviets dealt with matters as diverse as food distribution, military justice, and whether and how to take up positions in the front lines. In this sense, the soviets constituted something of an institutionalized mutiny. Kerensky also overplayed a weak hand by ordering, incredibly, another offensive in June 1917, just as the French army mutinies were calming down. In the summer of 1917, Kerensky placed far greater demands on his newborn citizen-soldiers than the French on theirs, on a far more uncertain basis. By the autumn, the Provisional Republic had gone the way of the tsar.

Only the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, another superbly educated European Russian, understood the delicate interplay between the microdramas of military authority and the macrodramas of keeping and holding state power. To the majority of Russian soldiers in 1917, loyalty meant mostly loyalty to home and village. Land and peace meant more to them than whether ‘Russia’ lost the war. Indeed, by the summer of 1917, ‘Russia’ ceased to have much coherence at all. The Russia of the tsar had been swept away, and no new Russia existed yet, at least not one responsive to their profoundly local concerns. The Bolsheviks understood that by delivering land and peace immediately, they could consolidate their hold on state power and could mobilize soldiers to resist a return of the old regime, as in fact happened during the civil war. Later, the Bolsheviks could proceed to the construction of the new citizen and the new citizen-soldier, of their own design. As the USSR took shape, soldiers as much as workers became the vanguard of the proletarian dictatorship.

Large-scale and overt mutinies have not occurred in western armies since WW I. The second world conflict never produced the combination of ideological ambiguity and military stalemate that proved so volatile in the first. The so-called Salerno mutiny, Britain's only troop rebellion during 1939-45, was caused by the inept management of convalescing soldiers who should have been sent home, but were diverted to strange units instead (see Salerno landing). It is intriguing to contemplate what might have happened in the second half of 1945 had large numbers of Allied troops been transferred from Europe to fight a protracted ground war in China or Japan. Soldiers have certainly resisted authority since 1945, often on overtly political grounds. French officers in Algeria plotted against the civilian authorities in 1958 and 1961, and indeed helped provoke the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. It is now widely recognized that the most violent form of protest on the part of American troops fighting in Vietnam involved fragging, in which an overly zealous officer or NCO would be ‘taken out’ of an equation of discontent. But in general war in the 20th century has become more intensive in terms of capital and less intensive in terms of personnel. High technology has meant increased professionalization, and perhaps the creation of the Clausewitzian ideal soldier. Mutiny in its historically recognizable forms, either as strikes or as preludes to revolution, seems to have declined accordingly.

Bibliography

• Hibbert, Christopher, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (Harmondsworth, 1978).
• Parker, Geoffrey, The Dutch Revolt (London, 1985).
• Pedroncini, Guy, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris, 1967).
• Smith, Leonard V., Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton, 1994).
• Watt, Richard, Dare Call it Treason (London, 1964).
• Wildman, Allan K., The End of the Russian Imperial Army vol. 1. The Old Army and the Soldiers' Revolt (March-April 1917) (Princeton, 1980); vol. 2. The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton, 1987)

— Leonard V. Smith

Despite its emotional connotation, mutiny is simply defined as collective military insubordination; it is the antithesis of discipline, which is itself the basis of military behavior. As a phenomenon, it is probably as old as armies and navies; in the case of the American armed forces, it dates back to the Revolutionary War. In the American services, as elsewhere, mutiny is nowadays a relatively rare occurrence.

Mutiny can be active or passive; conducted with or without arms, with or without violence. It can take place in peace or war, on ship or on shore, at the front or in the rear. It is the collective aspect of mutiny that presents such a challenge to the stability of the particular military organization, or, when it exists on a very large scale, to the state itself. That, and the disgrace to the affected unit, accounts for the secrecy and lack of candor that is usually associated with mutinous incidents. Thus, actions that are, in fact, mutinies, are often cloaked in euphemisms: during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army referred to its mutinies as “battlefield refusals,” a rhetorical invention without any basis in military law.

Historically, the main sources of mutiny have been rooted in a perception of unfairness on the part of the troops, of burdens inequitably shared vis‐à‐vis their military colleagues or their parent society. In the American military, this sense of relative deprivation has most often occurred as the result of perceived or actual racial discrimination. World War II saw several major mutinies by black soldiers and sailors in which the issues were discriminatory treatment: Bamber Bridge, England (1943); Port Chicago, California (1945); Guam (1944); Port Hueneme, California (1945). During the Vietnam War, in addition to some small unit incidents in the war zone, a major racially motivated mutiny involving over 100 sailors took place on board the USS Constellation (1972).

The notion of unfairness has also resulted from the demands of the military for service beyond an agreed or implied enlistment period. The mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line in June 1783 had as its central grievance the extension of duty beyond the original enlistment term; there were similar cases in the Civil War. In January 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, mutinous outbreaks took place in several overseas garrisons—notably at Manila in the Philippines—in which the troops protested their retention in service following the termination of actual hostilities.

The twentieth century has seen another fundamental source of discontent take root in American and foreign military organizations: the reluctance to serve for ethical, political, or moral reasons. U.S. Army troops questioned the legitimacy of their service in North Russia in 1919; in Vietnam there were many small unit mutinies in which the essential issue centered on the why rather than the how of service.

The process of most American mutinies has followed the pattern of mutinies in general: they tend to be passive refusals to participate rather than acts of violence; of short duration, usually measured in hours rather than days; and spontaneous rather than premeditated.

In spite of the gravity of the offense, the penalties for mutiny in the American military have been minimal. Reluctance even to use the term mutiny has resulted in troops being court‐martialed, if at all, for lesser offenses. The acceptance of the industrial strike as a legitimate expression of collective protest in twentieth‐century civil society has fostered a more lenient view of what was classically considered the most serious of military crimes.

[See also Ethnicity and War; Morale, Troop; Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Vietnam Antiwar Movement.]

Bibliography

• Robert I. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny, 1989.
• Leonard F. Guttridge, Mutiny, 1992

n. pl. -ies an open rebellion against the proper authorities, especially by soldiers or sailors against their officers: a mutiny by those manning the weapons could trigger a global war | mutiny at sea.

refuse to obey the orders of a person in authority.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

A rising against lawful or constituted authority, particularly in the naval or armed services.

In the context of criminal law, mutiny refers to an insurrection of soldiers or crew members against the authority of their commanders. The offense is similar to the crime of sedition, which is a revolt or an incitement to revolt against established authority, punishable by both state and federal laws.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - mytteri, oprør
v. intr. - gøre mytteri

Nederlands (Dutch)
muiterij, muiten

Français (French)
n. - mutinerie
v. intr. - se mutiner

Deutsch (German)
n. - Meuterei
v. - meutern

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανταρσία, στάση
v. - στασιάζω

Italiano (Italian)
ammutinarsi, ammutinamento

Português (Portuguese)
n. - motim (m)
v. - amotinar-se

Русский (Russian)
мятеж, бунтовать

Español (Spanish)
n. - motín, sedición
v. intr. - amotinarse, sublevarse

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - myteri
v. - göra myteri

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
叛变, 兵变, 暴动, 反抗

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 叛變, 兵變
v. intr. - 叛變, 暴動, 反抗

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 소요
v. intr. - 소요를 일으키다, 반항하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 反乱, 暴動, 反抗
v. - 反乱を起こす, 暴動を起こす

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) تمرد, عصيان (فعل) يتمرد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מרד, התקוממות‬
v. intr. - ‮התקומם‬

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