Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I.

In Between Mutiny and Obedience Leonard V. Smith centers his case study of the French Fifth Infantry Division during the First World War around a critical social history question, the question of power relationships within a relatively closed hierarchical institution. In factories, power relationships revolve around control of the work process, in armies they revolve around discipline. Smith carefully details how French soldiers and officers negotiated the meaning of obedience as they fought for four long years on the Western Front. Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault to inform the story of this internal struggle, the familiarity of Smith's methodological approach should induce a wide audience of social historians to delve into what remains unfamiliar territory for many - the social experience of going to war. Smith is among the first in an emerging group of scholars to tackle writing the social history of the military, an institution social historians have traditionally shunned.

Taking Karl von Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is politics by other means as a starting point, Smith examines how constant the expectations of soldiers have been throughout the history of Western civilization. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke introduced important moral limits to the practice of war by dictating that the use of violence be proportional to the war's objectives. No Just War theorist, not even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, conceded an independent role for common soldiers in the debate over proportionality. The position of the soldier in Western armies has remained to obey unquestioningly whether fighting for a king who represented God or fighting for a republican government that in principle represented themselves. The historical view has not been much different.

Smith offers a provocative new twist to Just War theory and Great War literature. He gives French soldiers an explicit role in setting the war's moral limits by politicizing them. "By definition, the citizen-soldier will not entirely relinquish the rights of the citizen," he writes. "Authority and obedience will be thus constantly subject to questioning and negotiation from below." (p. 11) Why men fight and how they fight, these are the questions Smith poses many times, in many different forms, throughout the book. The answer, Smith posits, will depend on what sources are used to respond to these questions. According to Smith, there are two transcripts to every battle. The official win/lose narrative assumes armies win when traditional norms of leadership are maintained and they lose when leadership breaks down. Along side of these, Smith places a hidden "experiential" narrative in which French soldiers and officers negotiated the degree of belligerence acceptable to those going over the top, regardless of whether they were winning or losing.

Smith relates traditional battle accounts of the Fifth French Infantry Division in a 1915 offensive at Neuville-St. Vaast, the defense of Verdun in 1916 and the crisis in trench warfare leading up to the mutinies of 1917. He then re-tells each episode to reveal the struggle for authority going on within the French army. Smith denies that these men were disloyal in thwarting orders from their ranking superiors. Like the officer sending down the battle plan, the poilu wanted to win the war. The two differed in the cost they were willing to pay for that victory. When the Fifth Division mutinied the traditional and experiential narratives converged. The previously hidden negotiation between officers and soldiers was now part of the official record.

In disagreement with Guy Pedroncini, the leading French historian of the 1917 mutinies, Smith views the mutinies as overt political acts. When French citizen-soldiers mutinied, they re-affirmed the link between war and politics. "I would argue that the significance of soldiers making their demands to their deputies can scarcely be overestimated...," Smith writes. "By reclaiming the right to make demands on their government, soldiers expressed their power and made their choices as citizens." (p. 193)

Did soldiers from other nations negotiate the rules by which they fought? Self-empowered citizen-soldiers were not apparent in either the British or German Armies during the war, but Smith hedges in accepting this as the last word. The portrait of these men as subject-soldiers stoically following victory-starved commanders into the slaughter indicates to Smith that the history of power relations within these two armies remains to be written. It is in Russia that Smith finds the closest parallel to the French experience as Imperial Army soldiers transformed themselves into Bolshevik citizen-soldiers in 1917. Smith's criticism of the recent preference for a cultural rather than social history approach to the war experience is well-founded. In this final section, however, Smith falls victim to another prevalent tendency of the field when he overlooks the experiences of those citizen-soldiers representing the other great democracy of the moment. Given the historiographic trend, it is not surprising that Smith ignores the Americans, but given his emphasis on citizen-soldiers, it is a noticeable omission.

There is much to recommend Smith's study to social historians, though it takes Smith until the second half of the book to free himself from his self-inflicted burden of constantly addressing existing historiographic debates among military historians. Smith and his soldiers find their collective voice simultaneously. Smith believes that the mutinies are part of a larger story, but they retain their intrigue in his account. Growing discontent in the fall of 1916 caused the French Intelligence Bureau to investigate morale by compiling soldiers' letters home. With these letters Smith no longer has the primary responsibility of speaking for the troops, instead they are narrating when the mutinies occur. Smith views the final French victory in 1918 as a testament to the human spirit apparent in these letters. He achieves a victory of sorts for himself by letting the originality of his own thinking shine through in the end.

Jennifer Diane Keene University of Colorado - Colorado Springs