1 - The pre-war Army

Summary

During the decades preceding the First World War, the French Army had an equivocal reputation. On the one hand, it possessed a glorious past in the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte that were taught in European military academies, yet, on the other, it had suffered an ignominious defeat in 1870 by the Prussian Army, while under the command of Napoleon’s nephew, self-declared Emperor Napoleon III. The glorious days of the levée en masse, when French citizens rose to the occasion and defeated the invader at Valmy in 1792, had been replaced by the inefficient mobilisation and performance of a professional army in 1870. Then, in 1894, right-wing and incompetent officers brought down international opprobrium on the Army, to add to the earlier military defeat, when its high command accused and convicted of treason an innocent artillery officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and then covered up the conspiracy.

How, then, to explain the eventual victory of the Army of 1914 that endured more than four years of battles and trench stalemate fought on French territory at appalling cost in lives and treasure? How to explain that France sat at the victors’ table at war’s end? This victory is one of the glories of the much maligned Third Republic.