1917 and the French Mutinies - André Loez

One hundred years after French mutineers shouted, “down with the war!” the legacy of the 1917 mutinies remains. Join Dr. André Loez in an eye-opening lecture as he addresses how the mutinies inform and reframe our understanding of World War I. Don’t miss the opportunity to consider what makes an army put down its weapons, or continue to fight. This program is proudly presented in partnership with Park University, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy with support from the French Mission du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale.
For more information about the National WWI Museum and Memorial visit theworldwar.org

[@raybarry4307]

I don't think the word Pacifist has anything to do with the munities. These troops were citizens of a republic that had done more than should have ever been expected from any troops for 3 full years at that point. The high command never had the right to just throw them at machine guns. And they definitely didn't have the right to throw them at machine guns year after year with no result. Most soldiers are will to give their lives when they can see it makes a diff. But when every single battle is a total slaughter with little to no gain that willingness disappears. The real miracle is that it took as long as it did to break out. I also think it says volumes that the French high command couldn't understand why these troops, Loyal almost to a man to France for those 3 years, would finally break at being treated like cattle by generals smoking pipes and cigars in villas 30 miles behind the lines.

[@dreamdiction]

During WW1 ten million men died in France, their deaths were not an accident, their deaths were not due to negligence or recklessness by their commanders, there deaths were INTENTIONAL. There is no possibility what-so-ever that the same suicidal tactics could have been used day after day, month after month, year after year, without the intentional extermination being the true motivation. If you don't understand this then it mean you don't understand the utter contempt which rulers feel for the people they rule over - and the same is going on today with rulers using non-military tactics against their own population.

[@philsphan4414]

The current trend in scholarship is “well the generals learned each time…” They did, especially the British. But of course the French rebelled. THEY weren’t going to benefit from British combined arms fighting and 2 million Americans overwhelmingly the weakened Germans because they were going to be dead. Historians need to see the war from the perspective of the poor guy in the trench.

[@docholiday7975]

@@philsphan4414 "Historians need to see the war from the perspective of the poor guy in the trench." You're 50 years or more behind the times if you believe that. John Keegan's reapproach to military history has long since taken hold and any current historian worth their bachelors already considers this; the very video you are commenting under is about this for crying out loud. It's about as new a concept as the fax machine.

[@scottscotty1660]

You make a very. good point. Brave men die due to incompetent leaders. Europe committed suicide. Murdered by fools at the top. Tragic how things haven't changed much, except now it's open betrayal.

[@gerardvandermeulen62]

I totally agree. These mutinies were more like strikes. "We will continue to fight, but refuse to participate in useless attacks. And demand better "working conditions"... Not so strange when you compare French pay and officer/soldier relations with the English ones.

[@pootisengage6672]

the best explanation of the french mutinies in english on the internet. trust me. i´ve searched

[@kidmohair8151]

I agree

[@jezalb2710]

If with a slight French accent,🙂

[@gerardvandermeulen62]

@@jezalb2710 a bit cheap

[@CONTACTLIGHTTOMMY]

Hard to criticize the mutineers. Imagine going over the top multiple times and seeing your comrades mowed down by machine gun and artillery fire...for minimal or no gain...over and over.

[@DJAnthrocide]

The key thing to remember is that the vast majority of the regiments affected were willing to defend the trenches, but unwilling to take part in madness like Champagne in 1915, Frontiers 1914, or Nivelle's Folly on the Aisne in 1917. The last is particularly egregious. It shares the title w/ Haig's push at Passchendaele as the most inexcusable waste of life in the War...

[@henryburby6077]

of course. the question is why did they mutiny when they did and how they did.

[@alganhar1]

It was not just the going over the top, or the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, which was caused more by the Germans completely changing their defensive Doctrine and catching the French by surprise with those changes than incompetence of the French High Command. There were other complaints the French soldiers had that were nothing to do with actual combat. Their rations were in general rubbish, their leave allotment was inadequate, they were kept in the line far too long and rotated out much less frequently than their British allies, and so on. The mutiny was as much about addressing these issues as they were about failed attacks, and if you look at Petain's rebuilding of the French Army after the mutinies you will notice very quickly that he absolutely does address the issues I brought up..... Like all things in history the Mutiny was a lot more complex than simply 'failed attacks'. It is the weakness of many so called analysis of such histories that all too often people are caught in the trap of preferring simple answers, rather than seeking that ACTUAL underlying causes, which are virtually ALWAYS far more complex than just 'failed attacks' or 'the generals were incompetent'. As for the casualties, you know the British Army for example actually suffered a similar casualty rate among the combat arms, especially the infantry in Normandy in 1944 as they did on the Somme? The Bloodiest battle in British history and casualties per day among the infantry were almost as high in Normandy... That is NOT unusual by the way, combat casualties in the Teeth arms in WWII were routinely as heavy, sometimes heavier than they were in WWI. The difference was simply they moved greater distances, so human psychology deems the battles in Normandy as acceptable despite the casualty rates being just as high.... Unfortunately for your 'no gain' idea, both WWI and WWII were war of attrition, due to the technology available in WWI that attrition was on the Western Front confined to a very small area compared to WWII, but they were BOTH wars of attrition...

[@alganhar1]

@@DJAnthrocide Hmm... about Passchendaele, some things you may want to consider. First Haig did not control the tactics at Army and Corps level, let alone lower. He gave out the objectives and assigned theatre Reserves or Assets as required. As a result calling it purely 'Haig's push' is rather ignoring the fact that lot of other people were involved. Second, when 3rd Ypres kicked off the weather was actually very good, it did not break until the battle was well underway. Third, what is generally ignored is that the weather of the late summer and autumn in Flanders that year was amongst the wettest on record for the ENTIRE 20th Century in that area. You can check it up. The British had been fighting around Ypres for 3 years by that point, why is it that ONLY in the late summer through to Winter of 1917 was the mud ever that bad? Its not the amount of shelling, the entire Ypres salient was a pitted moonscape of overlapping shellholes, the area around Passchendaele was hardly unique in that. Now, granted Haig should have called it off sooner, a lesson I may point out he learned (he called off Amiens after 6 days as German resistance began to stiffen AGANIST Foch's wishes in 1918 for example). But you cannot blame Haig for the region suffering among the heaviest period of rainfall over the area in a century. Thats not something Haig could feasibly be expected to predict. Plans were based on the rainfall experienced in 1914, 1915 and 1916, not the anomalous amount they saw in 1917.... As for Nivelle Offensive, have you ever wondered why it went so badly? Or did you just decide Nivelle was an idiot? Dangerous move considering he had actually done pretty damned well in the last three months of Verdun. S let me point something out, over the winter of 1916 - 1917 the Germans COMPLETELY changed their defensive Doctrine. Just as the French thought they had worked out how to defeat German doctrine, they went and utterly changed it, which meant the French then had to learn, from scratch, entirely NEW tactics to deal with an entirely new defensive doctrine..... But easier to shout that the Generals were stupid than actually go through the effort of trying to find out the REAL underlying causes isn't it? Far easier to pin it all on a scapegoat than bothering with all that effort, far too much like hard work right?

[@RosDalton]

Fantastic lecture, very enjoyable.

[@southenglish1]

A citizen army v. an all-volunteer army. A citizen army, one should expect complaints and possibly "mutinies", if the military aims are costly and futile. With an all-volunteer army; you signed up, now accept it.

[@davidluck1678]

good presentation, though Loez understates the immediate impact of the failure of Nivelle's highly oversold 1917 offensive. In Spears' book - he was principal Brit liason officer w the French Army - on WWI he has a terrific first-hand description of the genuine belief among many if not most of the front-line French soldiers and officers just before they went over the top; they really, really believed that "this time will be the end of it". And then....it all went to bloody hell. Again.

[@kidmohair8151]

there is actually a great deal of peripheral info available on the net, by which I mean to say, the mutiny is a sidebar to a look at the great war from another direction... the Great War channel here on the tube of you, did a quick snatch and grab when that time came up on the timeline they followed. I am glad M. Loez did mention "Paths of Glory" towards the end of the questions, but all I have ever found of that are snippets, and that is no way to see a film, particularly a Kubrick film...but I babble

[@WildBillCox13]

Most enlightening. Merci.

[@showze21]

The French Army mutinied because they were forced into a lot of extremely costly offensive attacks after the first battle of the Marne. The Germans took up strong defensive positions after their defeat on the Marne. The French had no choice but to try to push the Germans out of France. French 1915 offensives failed due to lack of artillery. The french army attacked bravely, but paid a terrible price. The Germans knew that they could not win the War, after first Marne they should have negotiated for peace and withdrawn from France in 1916, instead of prolonging the Holocaust of WW1

[@kentamitchell]

Unfortunately, German war aims were virtually unlimited. Look at B/L

[@jonhart7630]

That would have probably meant the end of the Kaiser and German aristocracy as happened in Russia to the Tsar and aristocracy there.

[@Freigeist2008]

Germany was the only nation, which wanted peace and tried to negotiate more than 20 times. Everything had been rejected by the Evilente. They wanted to destroy Germany at all cost and establish anglo-saxon world hegemony. The did get it after WW2 but with China on the rise its end is in sight and the world will be a better place

[@manlikederek925]

Maybe you have some relevant source to back your claim, however I believe the whole reason the Americans ever entered the war was because of how great the chance of the Germans winning the war and the American banks and industrialist not getting the money owed to them due to backing the losing side much heavier. Which occurred much later than when you suppose the Germans knew they couldn't win.

[@MN-vz8qm]

​@@manlikederek925​​well, history shows us that the US army was unnecessary, the us troops, arriving on the front in the last 100 days, were never a big player; hundreds of thousand supplementary fighting troops on the line wasn't a gamechanger during the allied offensive. Germany was dying because of the blockade, the german soldiers were starving, and the surrender of austria and the ottomans meant new fronts in the south, for which they had no men to defend. As fot the germans, they felt they couldn't pierce the entente lined quite soon. There are several quotes by the german leadership in the video of the great war channel named why germany lost ww1 (i think, i hope my memories are not mixed up with another video)

[@jezalb2710]

Interesting

[@samrevlej9331]

I love the people in the comments categorically telling everyone why French soldiers mutineered in one paragraph without having watched the conference, while André Loez, a historian specialized on this topic, devotes an hour of analysis to it. There is no better way to illustrate the difference between amateur historians and real historians.

[@docholiday7975]

KZbin comments in a nutshell.

[@kevinbyrne4538]

28:11 -- The number of mutinies INCREASED AFTER Pétain replaced Nivelle.

[@johnd2058]

Kevin Byrne ...exposing festering discontents.

[@danrooc]

46:00 I don't think the first book about the 1917 mutinies was written in 1967. By chance I got a copy of "Dare call it treason" by American historian Richard M. Watt, copyrighted since 1963. Not a novel, but an extensively researched work.

[@jonathanmarsh5955]

I believe that most, if not all, of the armies of the main protagonists had experienced disturbances/strikes/mutinies by the middle of 1919. Although these outbreaks of insubordination/disobedience/'Conduct Prejudicial...' may have taken on a 'revolutionary hue' in the eyes of the more excitable due to the Russian example, the usual salient reasons in the case of the British Armed Forces were far more prosaic and generally related more to perceived unfairness in Demobilisation priorities, job opportunities or their wives being treated badly by their employers/landlords. Real grievances that could certainly be spiced up by references to Pacifist/Socialist/Syndicalist movements to which many of the soldiers had belonged prior to the outbreak of the War in 1914. Sensitive and sympathetic responses by the UK authorities defused most of the 'Stoppages', although things did get lively at Kinmel Camp, Bodelwyddan and 6th Battalion of the RMLI mutunied in the Murmansk region after they had been inveigled into that intervention.

[@alganhar1]

Much of the reasons behind the French Mutiny were for similar reasons, something usually overlooked. The rations of the French were terrible, they were not rotated out of the line anything like as regularly as their British Allies, the opportunity for Leave was almost non existent, their alcohol allotment was made up of truly awful wine and so on. It is illuminating when you see Petain improving ALL these things, and more when he rebuilt the French Army. Rations improved, their alcohol improved, they were rotated out of the line more frequently and their allotment of Leave was significantly increased. Petain would have done none of those things if they were not issues....

[@philipinchina]

"One of the only". What is that supposed to mean?

[@mikeFolco]

Direct translation from French. Meaning "Only one of a few instances".

[@pierren___]

One of the few

[@jamespotts8197]

I'm about to Mutiny if he smacks his lips one more time!!!!!