Pétain becomes chief of the general staff

On 29 April 1917 General Philippe Pétain, commander of the French Group of Armies of the Centre, was appointed chief of the general staff of the army. The decree is dated 29 April, and the war minister’s letter announcing the appointment was sent on 7 May. Some accounts give 30 April, the date from which his tenure is counted. The post of chief of the general staff in Paris had until then carried little weight. Now, as the British official history (Falls) writes, it was remodelled as faithfully as possible on the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, so that its holder would become the government’s “military adviser”. In practice this meant that alongside the commander-in-chief, General Robert Nivelle, there was now a man whom the government trusted more.

The appointment was the result of the collapse of the Nivelle offensive. The great attack on the Chemin des Dames, which from 16 April was to break the German front in a day or two, brought territorial gains and thousands of prisoners, but at the cost of more than a hundred thousand killed, wounded and missing, without the promised breakthrough. The war minister, Paul Painlevé, who as early as December 1916 would have preferred Pétain at the head of the army and who since March had been Nivelle’s sharpest critic in Ribot’s government, wanted to dismiss the commander-in-chief. This was not easy, however. The prime minister, Alexandre Ribot, was against another change within a few months, and the British, who were bleeding at Arras in support of the French offensive, warned that they would regard breaking it off as a breach of the word given. Pétain’s appointment was a compromise: Nivelle stayed in his post, but under supervision.

Pétain was 61 at the time. In 1914 he had been a colonel close to retirement, regarded as an opponent of the doctrine of the offensive at all costs fashionable before the war. The war brought him rapid promotion, and he won fame in 1916 as the defender of Verdun. He inspired confidence in the soldiers because he was sparing of their lives, and among politicians he had a reputation as a cautious pessimist. At the conference at Compiègne on 6 April, when the government questioned the generals about Nivelle’s plan, he came out in favour of an attack with limited objectives: take the first and second German positions and stop there. Now he was to advise the government in precisely this spirit. Command of the Group of Armies of the Centre passed from him to General Émile Fayolle.

According to Falls, changes in command began with Pétain’s appointment. General Pont, chief of staff at Nivelle’s headquarters, was replaced by General Marie-Eugène Debeney. At the beginning of May General Charles Mangin, Nivelle’s closest associate since Verdun, who was blamed for the heavy losses, lost command of the 6th Army. The government now interfered in every step of the commander-in-chief. At Painlevé’s request the attack on Fort Brimont near Reims planned for the beginning of May was postponed and never took place.

On the same day, 29 April, according to the British official history, the first serious collective act of indiscipline occurred in one of the battalions that had been fighting for the hills in Champagne. It was the harbinger of a wave of mutinies that in May and June engulfed several dozen French divisions. Bringing it under control fell to Pétain. He remained chief of the general staff for only a little over two weeks: on 15 May the government dismissed Nivelle and appointed Pétain commander-in-chief of the French armies, and General Ferdinand Foch became chief of the general staff.