Start of the French Army mutinies

On 2 and 3 May 1917 at Saint-Bandry, a village west of Soissons where the French 2nd Colonial Infantry Division was resting after the April fighting, the first large mutiny in the French Army broke out. The division had been ordered back to the front to take part in another attack on the Chemin des Dames. According to the tally of the French historian André Loez, about a thousand soldiers, mainly from the 43rd Colonial Infantry Regiment, gathered in their billets, sang the Internationale and shouted “Down with the war!” (“À bas la guerre!”). Shots were fired, and anti-war leaflets circulated in the camp. It was not the first case of collective disobedience, but none before had been on such a scale. It was the beginning of a wave of mutinies that in May and June swept through several dozen French divisions and for a long time put France out of action for major offensives.

The 2nd Colonial Division

The name may mislead the reader. In the French Army the “colonial” units were those of the former marine infantry, made up mostly of Frenchmen, not of soldiers from the colonies. In April the division had fought on the western wing of the Nivelle offensive, at Laffaux, where the attack of General Charles Mangin’s 6th Army penetrated only a few hundred metres into the German defences on the first day and then made slow progress in heavy fighting. On 24 April the division was withdrawn to rest near Soissons. The soldiers were counting on a longer rest and on leave, which had been suspended for the offensive. According to Loez, as early as 1 May a soldier of the 43rd Regiment wrote a letter to divisional headquarters with a “respectful request” for rest.

Meanwhile the command was preparing the last big attack of the battle, set for 4 and 5 May. On the sector of the 6th Army, whose commander Mangin had been dismissed on 2 May, it was to break into the Hindenburg Line at Laffaux. On 3 May the division was ordered to assemble and march to its positions. Then the demonstrations broke out. As in most of the later mutinies, the soldiers did not attack their superiors, but demonstrated and refused to march. The situation was nevertheless brought under control: on 4 May the division’s units set off towards Laffaux and took over a sector of the front. As late as 5 May anonymous notes with the slogans “Down with the war” and “Death to those responsible” appeared in its billets near Laffaux. In English-language literature this episode is sometimes described as the mutiny of the “2nd Division” on 3 May, without adding that it was a colonial division.

Which mutiny was first

Identifying the “first” mutiny depends on what is counted as a mutiny. The French historian Guy Pedroncini, who in 1967 was the first to describe these events on the basis of the military archives, counts collective acts of indiscipline from as early as 17 April, the day after the offensive began. From mid-April individual refusals to go to the front also multiplied. The first collective mutiny is usually considered to be the events of 29 April in the 20th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division, which was fighting for the Moronvilliers heights in Champagne. In a camp near Mourmelon-le-Grand about 200 soldiers refused to return to the line and sang the Internationale. The British official history (Falls) is most probably writing about the same incident when it calls it the first serious sign of unrest and places it in one of the battalions of the Group of Armies of the Centre that had taken part in the attack on the Champagne heights. Some popular accounts state that the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment mutinied on 29 April, but the mutiny in that regiment broke out only at the end of May. The events in the 2nd Colonial Division were, however, the first outbreak so large, violent and political in tone: with about a thousand men involved, with shots, a revolutionary song and leaflets.

Why

The immediate cause was disappointment after the Nivelle offensive. General Robert Nivelle had promised a breakthrough in 24, at most 48 hours, and the end of the war. The soldiers believed it, and the British official history writes that before 16 April morale was excellent. All the greater was the disillusionment when within a few days the offensive cost more than a hundred thousand killed, wounded and missing, and there was no breakthrough. Falls also lists the chaotic changes of plan and countermanded orders, and the collapse of the medical services: thousands of wounded waited for hours for help and evacuation before the eyes of their comrades. He regarded the lack of leave as the main cause of discontent. In his view, many mutinies had no other source than a protest against the long suspension of leave during the offensive.

To this was added weariness with the third year of war, after the slaughter at Verdun and on the Somme, bad food, too short a rest between spells at the front, and the feeling that behind the lines, among the “embusqués”, those who had found themselves safe posts, nobody cared about the soldiers. News from Russia, where the revolution had overthrown the Tsar and soldiers were electing committees, suggested that the war could be ended otherwise than by victory. Two Russian brigades fought alongside the French on the Aisne. After heavy losses in April they were withdrawn from the front, and on 1 May they celebrated in a camp behind the lines, which was the beginning of their own mutiny (PL). The French command, and Falls after it, laid much of the blame on pacifist propaganda from home and on the interior minister Louis Malvy, who according to Nivelle did not want to suppress it. Later historians, from Pedroncini to Leonard Smith and André Loez, see the mutinies rather as a crisis of confidence in the commanders and a protest against the way the war was being waged than as a revolutionary conspiracy. The mutineers generally did not refuse to defend the trenches. They refused to take part in further attacks, which in their eyes achieved nothing.

What followed

3 May was only the beginning. According to the French official history, cited by Falls, the resumption of attacks in early May checked the spread of the mutinies for a time, and the real crisis came later: of the 119 recorded cases of collective indiscipline, 80 fell in the period from 25 May to 10 June. They affected 54 divisions. More recent research speaks of more than a hundred and ten mutinies in about 60 divisions and of several tens of thousands of participants. The worst affected were the armies that had fought longest on the Chemin des Dames and in Champagne: the 6th, 4th and 10th. The unrest also spread to trains carrying men on leave, in which revolutionary songs were sung and red flags hung out. Fortunately for France, news of the mutinies did not reach the Germans in time.

Bringing the crisis under control fell to General Philippe Pétain, who since 29 April had been chief of the general staff and on 15 May replaced Nivelle as commander-in-chief. He combined severity towards the ringleaders, with several hundred death sentences, of which a few dozen were carried out, with reforms: regular leave, better food and quarters, and the abandonment of costly attacks.