1917 French Army mutinies

Failed uprising in France during WWI April 2026 December 2025 France 1917 French Army mutinies the revolutions of 1917–1923 Les Mutineries de 1917 Lettre de Pétain au ministre de la guerre 29 mai 1917.jpg 1.0 Letter from General Pétain to the Minister of War on the mutinies 1917 04 25 1917 06 08 y World War I Nivelle Offensive Second Battle of the Aisne French Third Republic French Army mutineers The 1917 French Army mutinies took place by French Army troops on the Western Front in northern France during World War I. The mutinies started just after the unsuccessful and costly Second Battle of the Aisne, the main action in the April 1917 Nivelle offensive. The new commander of the armies in France, General Robert Nivelle, had promised a decisive victory over the German Empire within 48 hours. Morale in the French Army rose to a great height, and the shock of failure soured its mood overnight. The mutinies and the associated disruptions involved, to various degrees, nearly half of the French infantry divisions stationed on the Western Front. The term "mutiny" does not precisely describe events since the soldiers remained in the trenches and were willing to defend but refused orders to attack. Nivelle was sacked and replaced by General Philippe Pétain, who restored morale by talking to the men, promising no more suicidal attacks, providing rest and leave for exhausted units and moderating discipline. He held 3,400 courts-martial in which 554 mutineers were sentenced to death and 26 were executed. The catalysts for the mutinies were the extreme optimism and the dashed hopes of the Nivelle offensive; pacifism, which was stimulated by the February Revolution in Russia, the trade union movement and disappointment at the non-arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces. The French soldiers on the front had unrealistically been expecting the Americans to arrive within days of their declaration of war.Gilbert Bernard 1959 24–41 Background thumb|upright=1.5|The Aisne front in 1917, the site of the Nivelle offensive. More than one million French soldiers (306,000 in 1914, 334,000 in 1915, 287,000 in 1916, 121,000 in early 1917), out of a population of twenty million males of all ages, had been killed in fighting by early 1917. The losses had weakened the French will to attack.Keegan 1998 356–364 In April 1917, General Robert Nivelle promised a war-winning decisive victory. He proposed to work closely with the British Army to break through the German Empire lines on the Western Front by a great attack against the German-occupied Chemin des Dames, a long and prominent ridge that runs east to west, just north of the Aisne River. Nivelle applied a tactic that he had used with success at the First and Second Offensive during the Battle of Verdun in October and December 1916, a creeping barrage in which the French artillery fired its shells to land just in front of the advancing infantry to keep the Germans under cover until they had been overrun.Simkins Jukes Hickey 1983 78 Nivelle's attack, the Second Battle of the Aisne, failed to achieve its main war-winning objective. At the cost of very high casualties, the offensive exhausted the German reserves and conquered some tactically important positions. A French tank attack had also been launched near Berry-au-Bac, but half of the Schneider CA1 tanks engaged were knocked out. Nivelle was removed from his command on 15 May 1917 and was replaced by General Philippe Pétain.Keegan 1998 356–364 A similar battle would have been considered a draw in 1915, but the huge losses at the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme caused the psychology of the soldiers to be fragile in 1917. The strategic failure and the casualties caused a collapse in the morale of the French infantrymen, who had been so enthusiastic just a few days earlier.Gilbert Bernard 1959 28 However, the United States entered the war in April 1917, which was met with euphoria in France.Stovall 2015 275 Mutinies The Nivelle Offensive failed to achieve its strategic objectives, and by 25 April, most of the fighting had ended. On 3 May, the French 2nd Division refused to follow orders to attack, and the mutiny soon spread throughout the army. For most of the time, events were independent from one another and focused on specific demands: more liberty, more time with families and better conditions in the cantonments. From 16 to 17 May, there were disturbances in a chasseur battalion of the 127th Division and a regiment of the 18th Division. Two days later, a battalion of the 166th Division staged a demonstration, and on 20 May, the 128th Regiment of the 3rd Division and the 66th Regiment of the 18th Division refused orders. Individual incidents of insubordination occurred in the 17th Division. Over the next two days, spokesmen were elected in two regiments of the 69th Division to petition for an end to the offensive. By 28 May, mutinies broke out in the 9th Division, 158th Division, 5th Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. By the end of May, more units of the 5th, 6th, 13th, 35th, 43rd, 62nd, 77th and 170th Divisions had mutinied, and revolts occurred in 21 divisions in May.Terraine 1977 94, 100, 109 A record 27,000 French soldiers deserted in 1917; the offensive was suspended on 9 May.Terraine 1977 285 Strachan 2003 247 Even in regiments in which there was direct confrontation, such as the 74th Infantry Regiment, the men did not harm their officers but refused to attack.Keegan 1998 356–364 Most mutineers were veterans who did not refuse to fight but wanted the military authorities to be more attentive to the realities of modern war.Ashworth 2000 224–225 The soldiers had come to believe that the attacks that they were ordered to make were futile. News on the February Revolution in Russia was being published in French socialist newspapers, and anonymous pacifist propaganda leaflets were very widely distributed. In Soissons, Villers-Cotterêts, Fère-en-Tardenois and Cœuvres-et-Valsery, troops refused orders or to go to the front. On 1 June, a French infantry regiment took over the town of Missy-aux-Bois.Gilbert 1995 333–334 Tony Ashworth wrote that the mutinies were "widespread and persistent" and involved more than half the divisions in the French army.Ashworth 2000 224–225 On 7 June, Pétain told British commander Sir Douglas Haig that two French divisions had refused to relieve two divisions in the front line.Blake 1952 236 In 1967, Guy Pedroncini examined French military archives and discovered that 49 infantry divisions had been destabilised and experienced episodes of mutiny. Of the 49, nine divisions were gravely affected by mutinous behaviour, 15 were seriously affected and 25 were affected by isolated but repeated instances of mutinous behaviour. Altogether, 43% of the 113 infantry divisions of the army had been affected by the end of 1917.Buffetaut 2000 The crisis of morale occurred mainly in the infantry, which had borne the brunt of casualties. Branches such as the heavy artillery, which was located far behind the front lines, and the calvary units that was were mounted remained unaffected by the mutinies and provided detachments to round up deserters and to restore order. Only 12 field artillery regiments were affected by the crisis of indiscipline.Pedroncini 1983 Repression On 8 June, the military authorities took swift and decisive action: mass arrests were followed by mass trials.Gilbert 1995 333–334 Those arrested were selected by their own officers and NCOs, with the implicit consent of the rank and file.Keegan 1998 356–364 There were 3,427 fr conseils de guerre (courts-martial).Gilbert 1995 333–334 In 1967, research by Pedroncini found 2,878 sentences of hard labour and 629 death sentences, of which only were carried out. The relative lack of rigour in repressing the mutinies provoked adverse reactions from some French divisional commanders.Pedroncini 1983 Pétain and French President Raymond Poincaré, on the other hand, made it their policy to mend the French Army's morale and to avoid acting in a way that could aggravate its losses.thumb|A possible execution at Verdun during the 1917 mutinies. The original French text that accompanies the photograph notes that the uniforms are those of 1914/15 and that the execution may be that of a spy at the beginning of the war. When the news of February Revolution and of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II reached France, there were some demonstrations by Russian units in France. When an order from Russia to elect soviets was received on 16 April, the French Army whisked the Russians away from the front and moved them to central France. The Russians put on a large May Day parade and then mutinied.Greenhalgh 2014 207–208 The 1st Russian Brigade was encircled by loyal Russian troops in September 1917 at camp de La Courtine and bombarded with artillery, which killed eight men and wounded 28. That episode became the basis of widespread false rumours that the French had bombarded their own units.Gilbert Bernard 1959 29–31 The Russian troops (about 10,000 men) were demobilised and transferred to labour battalions, and the ringleaders were sent to North Africa in penal servitude.Poitevin 1938 Along with the deterrent of military justice, Pétain offered more regular and longer leave and an end to grand offensives "until the arrival of tanks and Americans on the front".Neiberg 2003 53 It was feared that infantry offensives could never prevail over the fire of machine-guns and artillery. Pétain restored morale by a combination of rest periods, frequent rotations of the front-line units and regular home furloughs.Gilbert Bernard 1959 24–41 Aftermath Analysis The most persistent episodes of collective indiscipline involved a relatively small number of French divisions; the mutinies did not threaten a complete military collapse. Because of the low morale in more than half of the French Army, it took until the early months of 1918 for the French Army to recover fully.Keegan 1998 356–431 Because of the mutinies, the fr Grand Quartier Général, the French High Command, became reluctant to begin another offensive. Pétain's strategy in late 1917 was to wait for the deployment of the American Expeditionary Forces and for the introduction of the new and highly effective Renault FT tanks: fr J'attends les chars et les Américains ("I am waiting for the tanks and the Americans").Mondet 2011 159 He had the support of Georges Clemenceau, who told President Woodrow Wilson in June 1917 that France planned "to wait for the Americans & meanwhile not lose more.... I like Pétain... just because he won't attack".Millman 2014 141 Martin Evans wrote that "the French army would sit tight and wait for the Americans".Evans 2014 84 Christopher Andrew and Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forster wrote in 1981, "Even after Petain's skilful mixture of tact and firmness had restored military discipline, the French army could only remain on the defensive and wait for the Americans".Andrew Kanya-Forstner 1981 116 When the Americans arrived in France in the spring of 1917, they were inexperienced. The US generals had orders not to accept responsibility for military zones and to "understudy" the British. That meant that for the summer and the autumn of 1917, British troops had to take over the zones that the French had vacated and also to teach American troops. The British tried to reinvigorate French morale by launching the Third Battle of Ypres, with varied success, but it pertinently relieved pressure on the French, to the south.French 1991 573–592Wynne 1976 314–315 It was not until early 1918, when the US troops had completed their preparations for war, that French morale improved. The Allies withstood the German spring offensive and, in the Hundred Days Offensive, comprehensively defeated the German Army, which, with the British naval blockade of Germany, paid dividends. Starved of food, Germany collapsed on the home front. Its leadership was compelled to sue for peace, as the army and the front were quickly pushed back. History The French government suppressed news of the mutinies to avoid alerting the Germans or harming morale on the home front. The extent and the intensity of the mutinies were disclosed for the first time only in 1967 by Pedroncini in his Les mutineries de 1917.Smith 1995 180–201 His project had been made possible by the opening of most of the military archives fifty years after the events, a delay that was in conformity with French War Ministry procedure. There were still undisclosed archives on the mutinies in the 21st century, which were believed to contain documents mostly of a political nature. They were not to be opened to researchers until 100 years after the mutinies, in 2017.Meyer 2007 540March 2018 Leonard Smith argued that the mutinies were akin to labour strikes and could be considered, at least partly, to be political in nature. The soldiers demanded more leave, better food and the end of the use of colonial workers on the home front. They were also deeply concerned about the welfare of their families. The rather subdued repression, according to Smith, was part of Pétain's policy of appeasement. Concurrently, the policy saved the appearance of absolute authority exercised by the Grand Quartier Général. Smith placed the mutinies into their wider ideological context and demonstrated the extent to which the French soldiers and mutineers had accepted the main tenets of republican ideology.Smith 1995 180–201 See also Étaples Mutiny (September 1917) Paths of Glory (1957 film) Footnotes 20em Bibliography Andrew Christopher M. Kanya-Forstner Alexander Sydney The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 1914–1924 1981 Stanford University Press Stanford, CA 978-0-8047-1101-2 Ashworth Tony Grand Strategy Trench Warfare, 1914–18: The Live and Let Live System 2000 Pan London 978-0-330-48068-0 Blake Robert The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, 1914–1918 1952 Eyre & Spottiswoode London 1019214627 Buffetaut Yves fr 2000 Votre ancêtre dans la Grande Guerre Your Forefather in the First World War Ysec Editions Louviers 2-9513423-2-2 Martin Evans France 1815–2003: Modern History For Modern Languages 2014 Routledge London 978-1-4441-1903-9 French David Watching the Allies: British Intelligence and the French Mutinies of 1917 Intelligence & National Security 1991 VI 3 0268-4527 Gilbert Bentley B. Bernard Paul P. The French Army Mutinies of 1917 1959 The Historian Taylor & Francis XXII 1 London 0018-2370 Gilbert Martin Martin Gilbert First World War 1995 HarperCollins London pbk. 978-0-00-637666-8 Greenhalgh Elizabeth The French Army and the First World War Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2014 978-1-107-60568-8 John Keegan The First World War 1998 Hutchinson London 978-0-09-180178-6 Meyer G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 Bantam Dell New York 2007 Delta trade pbk. 978-0-553-38240-2 Brock Millman Pessimism and British War Policy, 1916–1918 2014 Routledge London 978-1-135-26950-0 Arlette Estienne Mondet Le général J. B. E. Estienne - père des chars: Des chenilles et des ailes General J. B.E. Estienne - Father of tanks, Caterpillars and Wings 2011 Editions L'Harmattan 978-2-296-44757-8 Michael S. Neiberg Michael S. Neiberg Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War 2003 Brassey's Washington DC 978-1-57488-551-4 Pedroncini Guy Guy Pedroncini fr 1983 Les mutineries de 1917 The Mutinies of 1917 Publications de la Sorbonne, Presse Universitaires de France Paris 2nd 2-13-038092-1 Poitevin Pierre fr Collection de mémoires, études et documents pour servir à l'histoire de la guerre mondiale La mutinerie de La Courtine: les régiments russes révoltés en 1917 au centre de la France The Mutiny of La Courtine: The Rebellion of the Russian Regiments in 1917 in Central France 1938 Editions Payot Paris 715735154 Simkins Peter Jukes Geoffrey Hickey Michael The First World War: The War To End All Wars 1983 Osprey Oxford 1-84176-738-7 Leonard V. Smith War and 'Politics': The French Army Mutinies of 1917 War in History Sage New York 1995 II 2 180–201 0968-3445 Tyler Stovall Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation 2015 Westview Press Boulder, CO 978-0-8133-4812-4 H. Strachan The First World War: To Arms I Oxford University Press New York 2003 pbk. repr. 978-0-19-926191-8 The Road to Passchendaele: The Flanders Offensive 1917, A Study in Inevitability Terraine J. John Terraine 1977 Leo Cooper London 978-0-436-51732-7 Wynne G. C. 1976 1939 If Germany Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West Clarendon Press Cambridge facs. repr. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. 978-0-8371-5029-1 Further reading History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence Military Operations France and Belgium 1917: The German Retreat to the Hindenburg Line and the Battles of Arras I Falls C. Cyril Falls 1992 1940 HMSO London Imperial War Museum and Battery Press 978-0-89839-180-0 Greenhalgh Elizabeth Victory through Coalition, Britain and France during the First World War 2005 University of New South Wales Sydney 978-0-521-85384-2 Horne Alistair Alistair Horne The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 Abridged 1981 1964 Penguin 978-0-14-002215-5 https://archive.org/details/priceofgloryverd00horn registration Rolland Denis fr La grève des tranchées The Strike in the Trenches 2005 Imago Paris 978-2-84952-020-8 Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War I Leonard V. Smith Princeton University Press Princeton 1994 978-0-691-03304-4 Watt Richard M. Dare Call it Treason: the True Story of the French Army Mutinies of 1917 2001 1969 Dorset Press New York repr. 978-0-7607-2240-4 Williams John Mutiny 1917 1962 Heinemann London 640998048 Category:1917 conflicts Category:Military history of France during World War I Category:Military discipline and World War I Category:Mutinies in World War I Category:1917 in France Category:Opposition to World War I Category:Subsidiary conflicts of World War I Category:Revolutions of 1917–1923 Category:Events that led to courts-martial Category:French military scandals