French Officers Research Articles

Finding the American Revolution in France: François-Jean de Chastellux's Private Papers and Beyond

Abstract: With the exception of the renowned Marquis de Lafayette and, to a lesser extent, General Rochambeau and Admiral de Grasse, French soldiers and officers have historically received little attention in the literary of the American War for Independence. This is due to a number of factors, including restricted or closed access to private archival collections in France. This essay will demonstrate that it is possible, under certain conditions, to study personal, unpublished source material of "forgotten" French officers who participated in the American Revolutionary War, thereby providing new opportunities for research into early American history. To demonstrate the historical significance of such materials, this paper will concentrate on the (mainly) unpublished papers of François-Jean de Chastellux (1734-1788), an influential major general who served directly under Rochambeau. The Chastellux family has preserved his private papers for more than 240 years in their Château de Chastellux. This article details the contents of this private archive as well as the history of its creation and preservation. Additionally, the existence of Chastellux's archive raises questions about the possible existence of similar unpublished French archival collections, which may also offer new perspectives on the American Revolutionary War. Furthermore, in the contemporary digital era, families that choose to preserve their records in private archives may now make them digitally accessible to the academic community. This introduces new circumstances and opportunities for the access and translation of previously inaccessible information.

Intervention militaire française au Sahara Occidental opération Lamantin 1977

The little-known Lamantin military operation was a French intervention carried out between December 1977 and July 1978 by a squadron of Jaguars taking off from the OUKAM 160 air base near Dakar, Senegal. These strikes targeted the Sahrawi liberation army in Western Sahara and northern Mauritania. Despite the support of Moroccan forces, Mauritania was targeted by the Polisario in 1977, particularly on the 650km railway linking the Zouerate iron ore mine to the port of Nouadhibou, which is essential to the Mauritanian economy. President Mokhtar Ould Daddah, faced with the threat to his regime, requested French military intervention. With the Mauritanian army unable to counter the Polisario, Paris intervened. The operation was shrouded in secrecy to avoid repercussions, especially given France’s colonial past in Africa. Testimonies from Sahrawi and French officers shed light on this intervention.

Founder of the dynasty Nguyen Anh and bishop of Adran Piño de Been: the meeting of two civilizations

The article deals with one of the key moments in the history of Vietnam at the end of the 18th beginning 19th centuries, when the fate of the Nguyen dynasty and the Great South empire it created was being decided. The question of the role of the Catholic Bishop of Adran and the help of French officers Nguyen Anh, which has been controversial to date, is also being investigated.

Relationships between Moroccan soldiers and white women in WW II: ambiguous perspectives

The study focuses on Moroccan veterans’ stories about the French military command’s comprehensive interference in romantic relationships between Moroccans and European women in France during the Second World War. It is based on interviews with some Moroccan veterans about European women’s elopement with their alien suitors to Morocco. The Muslim soldiers’ attachment to their Islamic norms in a Western society was quite embarrassing to the French colonial mind. There was an element of ambiguity in the French officers’ objection to the French women and Moroccan men’s marriages, with the aim of establishing stringent demarcations between white females and colonial soldiers. While some French soldiers directly castigated Western women for befriending or marrying Moroccans, other French men were indifferent to the issue of hybrid relationships.

Count de Lubersac: Mission in Russia, 1916–1919

The author examines the activities of Count Jean de Lubersac, a member of the French military mission in Russia, and demonstrates how the main stages of his activities in that position vividly illustrate the evolution of French policy towards Russia in the critical years of Franco-Russian relations. Published in August 1918, “A Letter to American Workingmen” by Vladimir Lenin mentions his meeting with two French officers in February of the same year. One of them, Jacques Sadoul, is fairly well known, while the personality and area of activity of the other has not yet attracted the same degree of research interest. Meanwhile, his name, Jean de Lubersac, is mentioned in the memoirs of many French and Russian military and political figures when describing the events of 1916–1919 in Russia. Arriving in Russia as a mere second lieutenant on an air mission, this highly enterprising man quickly took up a position in the Russian Fifth Army, then in the French military mission and finally in the ranks of the interventionists in northern Russia. It was a most unusual feat for a junior officer, especially one from abroad. The primary sources for the study include the memoirs of those French and Russian nationals who knew de Lubersac personally, as well as documents from French and Russian archives. Although these sources contain only sketchy accounts, together they provide a fairly complete picture of what Jean de Lubersac was doing in Russia, not only in 1916–1919, but also later, in 1922.

Leaving the Pyrenees: France and Frenchmen as Perceived by British Soldiers in 1813–1814

Under the command of Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the future first Duke of Wellington, the British Army was one of the main participants of the military conflict on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808–1814. In the autumn of 1813, fighting on the side of the Spaniards and the Portuguese against the French Army, Wellington’s army ousted the enemy from the Spanish territories and launched an offensive on French lands. This article focuses on the reception of the image of France and the French in the diaries, letters, and memoirs of British soldiers and officers who participated in the war in France in 1813–1814. After leaving the Pyrenees, the British combatants believed they had returned to enlightened Europe from the “semi-civilized” Spain and Portugal. At the same time, the British image of the French combined elements of Gallophilia and Gallophobia that dominated in English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, British military narratives contained favourable characterisations of the locals whom King George III’s soldiers seemed to be freeing from Napoleon’s tyrannical rule. British officers noted such positive qualities of the French as politeness, gallantry, and friendliness. On the other hand, for the British military, the French Army became the personification of the “Other”. The texts of the English combatants described the soldiers of Soult’s army as cruel people capable of robbing and ruining their compatriots, and the French officers were perceived by the British military as self-interested careerists, ready to serve as a tool in the hands of Napoleon for the sake of promotion.

Communications

Communications William Kinderman The review by Barry Cooper of my book Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times in Fontes Artis Musicae (Vol. 68, No. 3 [July–September 2021], 273–276) contains errors. Professor Cooper writes that ‘the theory that the Eroica Sketchbook was begun in 1802 rather than 1803 (p. 65) is based on flawed evidence and has been comprehensively discredited’. However, the publication of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook: A Critical Edition, edited by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman (2013), and the literature cited therein, indeed supports a dating of 1802, which has not been ‘comprehensively discredited’. Cooper also writes that ‘the contredance . . . used in the finale of the Eroica was not composed until after Beethoven’s ballet Prometheus of 1801’, which makes no sense since that very theme already assumes prominence in the ballet, to be later absorbed into the very different context of the symphony. Furthermore, the gripping narrative of Beethoven refusing to play for French officers and leaving Grätz in defiance of his patron Prince Lichnowsky in October 1806 is not merely ‘a compilation from a number of unconfirmed recollections’ but an event that can now be vividly re-envisioned from Beethoven’s rain-stained music manuscripts and from the diary of the young poet Joseph von Eichendorff, who reported ‘threatening weather from the West’ with lightning and thunder coinciding with the ‘bolt out of the blue’ of Napoleon’s decisive victory at Auerstädt and Jena. William Kinderman University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2023 International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres

Memoirs of the Foreign Legion

Maurice Magnus was 39 years old when he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to join the fight against Germany in World War I. Magnus was an American expatriot living in Rome—a theatrical agent, tutor, newspaper correspondent, writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. He soon discovered his error—the Legion he found consisted largely of German exiles, prison-avoiding felons, and contemptuous French officers. Magnus spent about six weeks training in North Africa before a transfer to southern France provided the opportunity to desert and flee back to Italy. The Memoirs recounts his brief disenchanted tenure as a Legionnaire. After his military service his various enterprises had little success, and in 1920 a run of bad checks caused him to skip from Italy to Malta. Traced there eventually by the authorities, he faced extradition for charges of fraud and in desperation committed suicide. His acquaintances Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence prepared his Memoirs of the Foreign Legion for publication, hoping to clear the debts he left behind, and Lawrence wrote a long unflattering introduction. In the present volume the Memoirs is printed first, so readers have an unprejudiced experience of the text with Lawrence’s essay following for additional context. Magnus’s narrative contains offensive language. Some passages in his manuscript describing homosexual incidents that were excised by the original publisher are restored in this edition.

War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958

In this deeply researched and ambitious book, Neil MacMaster examines the neglected history of peasant resistance to French colonialism in Algeria's Chelif Valley. War in the Mountains upends the scholarly consensus that has attributed a politically inert and reactive character to the Algerian peasantry, illuminating their central role in the struggle for independence. MacMaster dismantles the consensus view across four sections and twenty chapters, giving readers an unprecedented look at the kinship units, political organizations, and shared histories that together shaped peasant resistance in the valley. Here, there was no need for urban revolutionaries to “awaken” the ignorant peasantry; peasant communities in the surrounding Dahra and Ouarsenis mountains had been organizing mutual aid and nationalist propaganda networks for decades prior to the arrival of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in 1956. When the Algerian Revolution finally came, these rural networks formed a base of support without which revolutionary forces could not have prevailed.War in the Mountains exemplifies just how much groundbreaking work can yet be done with colonial state archives. It is a truly social history that examines the critical—but often overlooked—kinship units that structured rural life in the Chelif Valley: the extended household (ayla) and the fraction (bocca), which were assemblies composed of the men in each ayla. By tracing the histories of individual fractions across decades, MacMaster identifies a means with which peasants preserved their communal solidarity and traditional social practices through years of land expropriation and dislocation. In the “native reserves” (communes mixtes) where most peasants lived, fraction patriarchs were often the sole links connecting the rural population to the colonial state. Absentee headmen (caïds) and French agents relied on these fraction leaders for local intelligence, offering access to state resources in exchange for their cooperation. As this system fell into crisis during the Great Depression, fractions and village councils (djemâa) coalesced into what would become a mass resistance movement. The fraction—a precolonial unit of rural social life—thus formed the organizational core through which peasants mobilized for a postcolonial future.The first three parts of the book chart the “terminal decline” of French rule in Algeria and the subsequent rise of the FLN “counter-state” that overtook it (254). Caught in an irreconcilable antagonism between the conservative defenders of the commune mixte system and reformers bent on modernization, the colonial state in Algeria underwent cycles of sputtering reform followed by reactionary backlash and repression. The constricted spaces that these cycles created for peasant political expression were never adequate to legitimize French rule, but they did provide a crucial medium for the introduction of mass electoral politics to the villages of the Chelif. Newly elected village councils operated as counterweights to corrupt French officials, compensating for the absence of colonial state administration with religious and kinship-based mutual aid networks. As revolutionary violence escalated, the survival of communist, Messalist, or Frontiste cells in the region depended on their ability to affect a “juncture” between themselves and the “dormant anti-colonialism of peasant society” expressed in these village councils (480). MacMaster contends that the FLN ultimately prevailed here because it offered a revolutionary program that was most responsive to the values and concerns of the peasantry.The final section of the text reassesses Opération Pilote, an ambitious counterinsurgency plan formulated by the anthropologist Jean Servier. With Pilote, Servier promised an ethnographic “hearts and minds” strategy—built upon political reforms and vast economic development initiatives—that would win over the region's peasant population. Military and civilian leaders soon hailed the operation as a success to be emulated throughout Algeria, but the book reveals stark truths that undermine this sanguine assessment. On the ground in the Dahra and Ouarsenis, the French presence largely continued as one of underadministration punctuated by catastrophic violence. Servier's ethnography also quickly fell out of favor with French officers, replaced by a simplistic program of sloganeering and propaganda derived from the field of behavioral psychology. Moreover, the FLN remained superior to the French in providing basic services and security to the Chelif peasantry. Pilote and its “successes” have been a staple of counterinsurgency literature for decades; MacMaster offers a necessary and overdue corrective to these accounts that dwells on the self-defeating brutality counterinsurgency practitioners unleashed on the very peasants they were supposed to be winning over.By positioning peasants at the center of Algeria's revolutionary struggle, War in the Mountains compels scholars to reconsider the balance of forces driving the country's independence and subsequent state formation. It also establishes a comparative research agenda grounded in an attentiveness to enduring structures of rural life that promises to influence the field for years to come. Accessibly written, albeit dense in its argumentation, this text will make for compelling reading in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level seminars.

The Battle of El Herri in Morocco

What does the French massacre of Amazigh people at El Herri in November 1914 reveal about broader patterns of colonial conquest? How do such patterns demonstrate the beliefs of French officers about the best way to conduct war at the beginning of World War I? Using extensive archival research, published primary sources, and Amazigh oral tradition, this article provides a narrative of the Battle of El Herri that analyzes the physical, sexual, and gendered violence that French troops exacted against Amazigh tribes. It argues that leading French military figures spun the “battle” to create a narrative that was racially inflected and self-serving. Led by Resident-General Lyautey, these leaders claimed that their philosophy of conquest was the only one that could result in successful war in Morocco, and by extension, Europe itself.

Bonnie Effros. Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa.

Bonnie Effros. Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa.

ISLAM AND ANTI-COLONIAL REBELLIONS IN NORTH AND WEST AFRICA, 1914–1918

AbstractEuropean empires experienced widespread anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War. These rebellions occurred for many different reasons, reflecting the diversity of context and history across colonial societies in Africa and Asia. Religion naturally played a strong role in most of the anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War, most prominently Islam. This article looks at the role Islam played in two key anti-colonial rebellions in North and West Africa: the rebellions in Batna, Algeria, and the Kaocen War in Niger, respectively. The article examines how Islam was instrumentalized by rebels, imperial collaborators, and French officers and administrators to further their own ends. Rebels called upon Islam to help inspire anti-colonial movements, to bind together diverse populations, and to contextualize their actions in wider socio-political conflicts. Imperial collaborators likewise called on religious authority to assist with European imperial recruitment efforts. French officers and administrators used Islam both as a justification and a target for collective punishment and repression after the rebellions were put down from 1917. This repression is still under-studied in a period usually portrayed as evidencing broad imperial harmony, rather than violent extraction and oppression.

Honour among gentlemen ? Captured French officers and the politics of parole d’honneur in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870/71

Dans l’historiographie récente, la guerre de 1870-1871 a souvent été considérée comme une étape clé sur le chemin vers la guerre totale du XXe siècle. Bien que cet article ne tranche pas le débat, il remet en question les modèles d’explication binaires axés autour de la « haine héréditaire ». En basant son argumentation sur le grand nombre de prisonniers de guerre (420 000 Français et 8 000 Allemands), l’auteur met en avant les convergences transnationales dans les discours sur le devoir et l’honneur patriotique. Grâce à la tradition européenne du « droit d’usages cosmopolites », les officiers pouvaient s’engager à ne pas fuir et obtenaient en échange, la liberté de circuler pendant leur captivité. Un usage abusif constituait une menace, non seulement pour l’honneur du soldat, mais aussi pour la réputation de son souverain et de sa nation. Cependant, la pression sur les officiers français augmente lorsque le manque de commandants de troupes suite aux défaites de l’automne se concrétise. L’échappée des trois célèbres généraux, Auguste Ducrot, Eugène Barral et Albert Cambriels, révèle de manière remarquable, comment un dilemme moral a pu ouvrir un dialogue transnational, rapprochant des ennemis qui partagent les mêmes valeurs.

Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa, by Bonnie Effros

Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa, by Bonnie Effros

The end of the great military leader? ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ French army officers in the First World War

ABSTRACT First, what happened on the frontlines of this war to the notion of the ‘great man’ or great military leader in the sense used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries and in military literature all the way to the early twentieth? Second, if, as it seems, the violence and duration of the fighting in this war dissolved the notion of greatness in the sense of ‘a high level of attained dignity,’ what did it mean to be a good or bad French army officer from 1914 to 1918, during what was the institution’s longest experience of war?

Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa by Bonnie Effros

Reviewed by: Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa by Bonnie Effros Eileen M. Angelini Effros, Bonnie. Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa. Cornell UP, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5017-0210-5. Pp. 371. Effros examines the previously understudied French military officers' fascination with the Roman remains they discovered in Algeria from 1830 to 1870 (the period immediately following the conquest of the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers and Constantine), and the resulting violence that arose out of their archaeological exploration, which led to the development of a new identity for French military and civilian settlers. In her introduction, "War and the Destruction of Antiquities in the Former Ottoman Empire," Effros sets the stage for her study by drawing a comparison between the current press given to the destruction of ancient archaeological sites in Syria and northern Iraq by Daesh and the lack of attention given by journalists to the fact that "for more than a century Europeans argued that these antiquities, and the monuments of which they were a part, had little or no value to the Arab inhabitants of the lands from which they were purchased, stolen, received as gifts, or taken by force" (1). She further elucidates how 1870 and 1880 legislation met with limited success in its efforts [End Page 263] to ban the export of ancient remains as well as to establish antiquities museums in Istanbul and Tunis. Yet, even more painful to learn in "Knowing and Controlling: Early Archaeological Exploration in the Algerian Colony" is that while these French colonizers were conducting their work, they destroyed the history of long-established Muslim communities, thereby establishing an odd combination of respect for the Maghreb's ancient past while violently suppressing and exploiting its nineteenth-century existence. Particularly relevant in "Envisioning the Future: French Generals' Use of Ancient Rome in the 1840s" is her demonstration of how the French believed that in learning from Roman successes and mistakes, they would achieve complete domination of the region. Across the chapters "The View from Ancient Lambaesis," "Institutionalizing Algerian Archaeology," and "Cartography and Field Archaeology during the Second Empire," Effros demonstrates that through their efforts to record the history of the ancient Romans, while at the same time persecuting the Arab and Berber inhabitants of colonial Algeria, the French sought to acquire knowledge at the expense of others in order to become European imperialists: "By the early 1850s, however, French archaeologists, a significant number of whom were by this point metropolitan scholars or civilian settlers rather than military officers, were content to claim that Arabs and Kabyles were entirely uninterested in Roman antiquities" (161). But Effros is deliberate in explaining the actual position of the Arabs and Kabyles: "Antiquities played an integral part in their daily lives, belief systems, and customs, as has been demonstrated in contemporary cases in other parts of the Mediterranean such as newly independent Greece" (161). Complementing her analysis of how the French conducted themselves in Algeria from 1830 to 1870 is her epilogue, "Classical Archaeology in Algeria after 1870," which underscores how French actions in Algeria contributed to the professionalization of archaeology in France. Eileen M. Angelini SUNY Empire State College Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Entre fidélité olympique et nationale. Le cas du membre du CIO Alberto Bonacossa

Le comte Alberto Bonacossa (Vigevano 24.8.1883 – Milan 30.1.1953) est l’un des plus importants et influents dirigeants sportifs italiens au XX e siècle. Il va ainsi occuper des fonctions à différentes époques de la période libérale de l’Italie à la République, en passant par la période fasciste. Pour ne citer que ses engagements internationaux il fut notamment président de la Fédération internationale de motocyclisme, vice-président de celle des Automobile-clubs, membre de la Ligue international du hockey sur glace et de l’International Skating Union, mais surtout, à partir du 1925 membre du CIO et (dès 1935) de son Comité exécutif. Dès lors l’ambition de notre article est d’analyser en détail les étapes de la carrière d’Alberto Bonacossa, en particulier pour saisir l’importance de son appartenance à une noblesse italienne dans le cadre de son engagement dans des réseaux sportifs internationaux dominés par une culture qui était en même temps cosmopolite, transnationale et patriotique/nationaliste. Nos analyses reposent notamment sur les archives du comité national olympique italien (CONI) et sur les archives du CIO, et celles-ci doivent permettre de souligner comme les tensions entre le national et l’international se réactualise singulièrement au sein des organisations sportives internationales, autour de certaines biographies.

Construction of the racialised and colonised other: global comparatives in imperial and colonial archaeology

Whereas Sarr and Savoy (2018) focus on artefacts taken from various African countries after 1885, Incidental archaeologists, considers “the first four decades of the French conquest and pacification of Algeria under the authority of the French military Government General” (p. 24). Throughout the volume, Effros presents a convincing argument in which the social history of military infrastructure lays the groundwork for the future of the French civilising mission. She is clear about the magnitude of the task that the book is engaged in; it provides links between early French archaeologists and epigraphers and their place within the development of the disciplines. It also considers the ways by which romanticised narratives, created by French officers, about the classical archaeology of Algeria led to irresponsible destruction of antiquity, violence against local resistant populations and classifications that became constitutive of colonial archaeological interest and practice.

Plan Z: The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’s Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936

Following the formation of the Popular Front in 1934, French generals feared that the alliance, which included the French Communist Party (pcf), could foreshadow a coming revolt in Paris. Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin responded by preparing to implement Plan Z, a plan to defeat a Parisian revolt. Given politicians’ fear that many French officers were antirepublican, the French Army would have faced a major political crisis if Plan Z had leaked. Plan Z called for a multidivisional assault on Paris, which showed that the General Staff believed a large-scale revolution was possible. Understanding the development of Plan Z adds to scholars’ recognition of French officers’ long-term fear of communism and mistrust of civilians. It reveals that senior officers were more politicized and afraid of civilians than most scholars have realized and helps explain the military’s central role in betraying the Third Republic and creating the Vichy Regime in 1940.

Français tirailleur

AbstractFrançais-Tirailleur is the conventional name for the French-lexicon pidgin used in France’s African army during the 19th and 20th centuries.Tirailleurliterally translates as ‘rifleman’ or ‘sharpshooter’, but in time, and in practice, it came to refer specifically to indigenous colonial soldiers. The literature on the variety is anything but vast, but some publications are partly or entirely devoted it, almost invariably drawing on one and the same source (an anonymously authored phrasebook intended for use by French officers commanding African soldiers;Anon. 1916). Another thing most of them have in common is that they see the language as an instrument of oppression, and as we shall see, quite a few claim that the pidgin was even invented for this specific purpose.