Where Once we Fought Germans, Now We Slaughter Countrymen: The Second Act of the National Tragedy

Where Once We Fought Germans, Now We Slaughter Countrymen
The Second Act of the National Tragedy​

“Who shall we indict as those who betrayed France? The soldiers who fought for it, who bled and died for it? Or the politicians who tossed them into the abattoir for a dime, who now proclaim that the soldier of France is no longer French? My friends, I am fully aware that you will avenge this slander. You shall make France whole, you will put an end to this carnival of lies, and with your assistance, upon our native soil we shall build a new state for the working and toiling peoples of this nation!”

-Ludovich-Oscar Frossard

“And so what, that the army has been bolshevized, the nation spat upon, and Paris seized by a den of rogues? We select few shall remain loyal to the true France, the eternal France, which persists through all depredations that this brazen and fallen age may hurl at it. We will bear the cross, we will harden ourselves until we are alive to nothing besides the fate of the patrie, and when the time of judgement comes, we shall cleanse this nation of its filth and give it a new and glorious birth.”

-Charles Maurras

“When a man has been fighting for so long, it is quite easy for him to forget what he is fighting for, or even to forget the person he was before he took up arms. One day, perhaps, the planned victory will come, France will be redeemed, and we shall all rejoice, but in truth it is better not to think of such things for now”.

-Anonymous quote, soldier of the French White Army.

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The first years of the French Civil War were not marked by great battles, heroic gestures, or feats of bold daring. This was a war which was fought by an exhausted, war-weary people, and which was propelled forward by its own immanent logic. The war was waged because it had to be - because of the fear of retaliation, because so much blood had already been spilled, because submission to the enemy was a failure of one’s soldierly duty or masculine sense of honor. The war went on because the adversary had committed an unspeakable act of betrayal: Clemenceau had abandoned the soldiers, or alternatively, the soldiers had abandoned France.

What the thirty years war was for Germany, the soldier’s decade was for France. For five years, the French nation rallied to repel the foreign invader in a desperate struggle of national defense. France never achieved the satisfaction of expelling the hereditary enemy from the homeland; when they left, the Germans did so of their own accord, abandoning the barren and stripped northeastern provinces and streaming away over the Vosges mountains.

By November, 1919, the French nation was thoroughly traumatized by the past half-decade of war. Most expected that the vast sacrifices which the state demanded would be recompensed in some form in the postwar era. Even those who had given up hope of a decisive victory still imagined that, after a just peace was signed, a new era of peace and prosperity would reign in Europe. Yet the fires of civic enmity ran hotter than anyone expected. The experience of the soldiers is the classic one, for at the crucial moment during the German mutiny, French troops refused to engage in an offensive to retake French territory, and instead turned their bayonets on their officers. This is the conventional beginning of the “Brother’s War”.

Yet in truth, innumerable actors spent years clearing the ground for the conflict, none more fervently than Clemenceau himself. By 1919, little daylight remained between the liberal radical and his authoritarian enemies across the Rhine. Not only the socialist domestic opposition, but also the soldiery became the target for the government’s repression. Even as Clemenceau vowed to continue the fight, he privately spoke of the “rabble of troops” in less than flattering terms. Bolshevization at the front was attributed to the brutalizing effects of war. There were doubts that reintegration into civil society was really possible for most of the troops. Of course, this mindset went against all the patriotic myths of the good, loyal soldier, and it was rarely voiced by the official organs of government. Yet it was increasingly betrayed by newspapers and civilian correspondence. Cabinet members spoke privately about the need to surveil soldiers after they were demobilized, and the language of disease and infection came to dominate politics. In both the secret propaganda of the socialists and the official propaganda of the government, the political opposition was pictured as plague to be expunged from the body politic.

During the French Civil War, the thin line separating the state and the army finally dissolved. The soldier’s state, of course, is the quintessential form of fascism, and the deeply pathological trajectory of the Legitimist government should warn us against drawing moral equivalences. Yet one cannot ignore that a similar translation of military prowess into political power took place in the Paris government, particularly in the later years of the war. The French Soldier’s and Worker’s Republic may have lacked the ethnocidal and antisemitic instincts of their right-wing opponents, but they compensated for this with a thoroughgoing disdain of the “peasant wreckers” and other “civilian fifth columns”.

The initial distribution of territories between the two sides did not correspond in any systematic way to political loyalties. While the Loire and Rhone Valley were both strongholds of socialist sentiment, the vast rural territories in between these two regions were hostile to the socialist government, as were the northeastern regions. Attacks from farmer’s militias loyal to the legitimist Clemenceau government fed a sense of paranoia in Paris. A similar pattern held in the south: it took extraordinary bloodletting and ongoing surveillance for the so-called “French National Army” to pacify the cities of Bordeaux and Marseille. The failure of either government to fully quell internal unrest contributed to chronic instability and the political ascent of the armies.

…Gender played a critical role in the popular understanding of the war. When the men of the first red militias arrived in Paris, they were struck by the parading women workers equipped with rifles and bayonets. A soldier remarked that he did not expect to find a “Lady’s Commune”, and the term quickly stuck. The phenomenon of the red soldier also seemed to defy traditional sociological categories - who was this figure? A peasant, a worker, a bourgeois? They roamed the city in drunken bands, until the womenfolk shamed them into remobilization. A not insignificant number of the female workers joined the fledgling red army. Off they went to confront the Whites; once the siege of Paris was broken, a second bacchanalia erupted.

In the white propaganda, pioneered by early theorists of fascism such as Charles Marraus, the Paris government was depicted as a hotbed of anarchy and confusion. This was a tableau-vivant which echoed the utopias of Plato and comedies of Aristophanes, in which the order of things was reversed and rowdy women were installed at the heights of power. The men were hyper-masculinized, depicted as victorian savages, brutalized by the war and lacking the intelligence required to rule. They were ready recipients for the Bolshevik infection. The Reds, too, engaged in a form of gender propaganda, though this was directed above all at the peasants and farmers, who had grown fat from the Great War and yet lacked the elan to do battle. Amidst the food troubles, they were a natural target. Newspapers, pamphlets, and posters unswervingly depicted them as scheming and effeminate gluttons who sought to undermine the new worker and soldier’s state from within.

The First Year of War

The first revolutionary wave swept the proletarian cities and worker’s suburbs of France with the same intensity as it did Central Europe. In the Rhone Valley, a hotbed of worker’s councils and anarchism, two days of failed attempts to expel workers from the occupied factories led to a general demoralization of the police force. The activist Pierre Monatte, who had maintained ties with both the soldier’s and worker’s councils, broke out of prison and arrived on the streets of Lyon on the 8th. After a day of pitched battles, the police stood down, and the new revolutionary city government led by Monatte declared its loyalty to Paris. Similar events unfolded in the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, Macon and Dijon.

In Paris, events proceeded with greater rapidity. After Boris Souvarine, Jean Jaures, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and other dissidents were freed from prison, a socialist republic was proclaimed. The police, terrified of the example of the Russian Revolution, refused to fire on the mostly female crowds, and did not make an attempt to arrest the ringleaders of the coup. Clemenceau fled the city before the crowds could target his government.

Jaures was an unlikely figure to lead a revolution. Before the war, he had been firmly aligned with the majority, reformist strand of French socialists. Although ideologically committed to internationalist pacifism, he also felt a sense of emotional attachment to the French nation, and had been instrumental in rallying the socialists to support the war. His arrest and the repression of the labor unions radicalized him, but most historians believe that his decision to declare a socialist republic was compelled by the force of circumstance and the revolutionary workers.

Jaures, who had spent years trying to corral his party, increasingly became a mere figurehead. His attempt to include more moderate figures in his cabinet, such as Leon Blum, was frustrated by the machinations of Frossard and Souvarine. A body of delegates appointed by the women’s councils and union locals of Paris and the Loire Valley, known as the worker’s congress, insisted on its veto power over cabinet appointees. The tens of thousands of radicalized soldiers converging on Paris successfully appealed for their own representatives to be able to sit on this body, which lent it a somewhat less ideological character.

Most historians now agree that the first few months of the war represented a crucial lost opportunity for the new socialist government. With Clemenceau’s white armies encircled and lacking means of procuring supplies from the larger world, a quick march to the south may have extinguished the rival government and secured France for the revolutionaries. Yet the delegates of the soldier’s councils continued to equivocate, worried that any large-scale movement of troops would lead to a diminished presence at the worker’s congress. Frossard and Jaures were also worried about a potential British attack from the north, and believed that sending off the loyal soldiers might compromise their own position. As a consequence, the white army was able to gather its forces and march north into the Loire Valley. Here, panic set in, and the worker’s congress hesitated to send its armies into open battle. Their instinct, formed by over a century of revolutionary practice, was to set up barricades and defenses in Paris. In retrospect, this was a needlessly cautious strategy, but there was little trusty intelligence on the relative weakness of the white forces at the time. After breaking into the Loire Valley, the white army managed to encircle Paris, but it was stopped time and again in the worker’s suburbs. When a small group of red militias attacked the white army from the east, the siege dissolved.

Possessed of a new confidence, Frossard ordered the worker’s militias to pursue the white army through the Loire Valley. After several successes, the larger red army finally consented to leave the city, and fought a vicious campaign towards Lyon against the retreating eastern flank of the whites, routing the officers in several pitched battles and allowing a stable corridor to be established with the syndicalists in Rhone. By June, the socialists controlled a mostly contiguous territory running from Lyon in the southeast up through Dijon, Troyes, and Reims, and stretching west to Nantes and La Rochelle. A large white salient still remained in the middle of the country, concentrated around the city of Bourges and the conservative, agricultural heartlands of Central France. The next campaign would attempt to eliminate this with flanking attacks from Lyon and Nantes.

At this point, we must briefly discuss the situation of the rival legitimist government to the south. Even before the outbreak of civil war, Clemeanceau’s days as Prime Minister looked to be numbered. His decision to purge both the socialist and left-liberal opposition had strengthened his conservative critics, and widespread hatred of his policies of “war austerity” amongst even the loyalist middle-class alienated his core supporters. When he arrived in the sleepy town of Toulouse, his army was dominated by conservative officers displeased with Clemeanceau’s decision to retain Nivelle the chief of staff. The northern expedition toward Paris was as much an attempt to salvage the reputation of the prime minister as it was an effort to quench the revolution before it could marshal its superior resources. Its ignominious failure and the arrival of the returning officers forced a change in Clemenceau’s government. Reluctantly, he fired most of his ministers, replacing them with conservative catholics, monarchists, reactionaries, and army officials. The likes of Jean Plichon, Charles Maurras, Francois de la Rocque, and Noel Edouard did not always get along well with the liberal-radical Prime Minister. The proliferation of independent right-wing militias and the failure of many liberal parliamentarians to evacuate Paris further diminished Clemenceau’s power. In a bid to retain some influence, Clemenceau proposed his old rival Petain as the chief of staff. At the time, both men were united by their distrust of the “sectarianism” of the catholics and monarchists. Still quite popular amongst the common soldiers, Petain was appointed chief of staff in mid-June and rallied the army for a “war of national salvation”.

Petain’s victories in the summer campaign gave Clemenceau’s flagging political career a new lease on life. Faced with a numerically superior opponent, Petain chose to provoke his opponents into smaller battles that could be defeated piecemeal in territories dominated by the loyalist peasantry. He was assisted by the decision of the red government to launch many smaller attacks, which were frequently poorly coordinated, allowing him to defeat them in detail. While he was forced to trade land for time, including the key city of Bourges in August, the red army was exhausted by the fall, and their guns fell silent. An attempt by Petain to launch a counteroffensive in September was less successful; with the armament factories of the Loire Valley swinging back into production, he found himself outgunned by red artillery. To the horror of all the participants, the battles ended in the resumption of trench warfare along select sectors of the front.

In the year’s final months, both the front itself and the two governments began to stabilize. Jaures accepted his role as a figurehead, and the troika of Frossard, Loriot, and Souvarine emerged as the true power behind the Paris government. They solidified their position with a campaign of sweeping collectivization and nationalization of the major war industries. Faced with little other option, they devolved a great degree of autonomy to the anarcho-syndicalists in the Rhone Valley, allowing them to form their own militia units and govern themselves as a de facto allied state. Administration was slowly re-established in the impoverished northeastern provinces previously occupied by Germany, and white guerillas painstakingly flushed out of Lorraine and Burgundy in a brutal conflict that likely killed more Frenchmen than the conventional battles of 1920. Conservative Brittany, cut off from the white government, still remained out of reach, and local authorities formally declared their neutrality in the conflict over the summer.

At least for now, Clemenceau faced a kinder fate than Jaures. He reached a modus vivendi of sorts with the conservative catholic opposition, and begrudgingly reversed a number of the anticlerical policies of the previous decades. His appointment of Petain had given him a crucial ally, though it was unclear how long this tenuous alliance could remain intact. Withe the assistance of Catholic and Reactionary militias, the whites completed their own bloody consolidation. With the help of the British, the worker’s communes in the port cities of Marseille and Bordeaux were harshly suppressed, and the dock facilities opened to trade. At first, this was more a trickle than a torrent - most of the dockworkers who were not killed outright in the white massacres elected to leave the cities after they sabotaged vital port equipment.

Most of the fleeing workers made their way up to the Rhone Valley, though some fled into Italy and Alsace-Lorraine. The “Death of Marseilles” radidly became a touchstone of the French socialist imaginary. When news reached Paris of the white atrocities, there were another round of protests in the streets, and two dozen citizens accused of collaborating with the Clemenceau government were publicly lynched to the tune of the Marseillase. The red terror, which had quieted since the successful defense of Paris, started again in earnest. In a gesture of solidarity Lenin and Luxemburg temporarily halted the ongoing Konigsberg negotiations to jointly condemn the “war on the French proletariat”, and expelled small diplomatic delegations from Britain.

In the final months of 1920, artillery shells, guns, and even a small number of landships began streaming into France. This freed up crucial industrial labor on both sides, which prompted them to institute a new draft to shore up their dwindling and exhausted armies. Yet this would not be an easy task: already, hundreds of thousands of refugees (white and red alike) had streamed into German Alsace-Lorraine and Spain, and rumors of a draft prompted another flight of young men and their families. Increasingly, France appeared to be a broken and shattered land - the battles south of the Loire Valley and partisan fighting in Burgundy and Lorraine had devastated agricultural production, and the army’s de facto monopoly on rail transport made the task of food distribution extremely difficult. As 1921 dawned and France prepared for its seventh year of war, Frossard and Clemenceau pleaded with their allies for additional food imports, warning of the prospect of famine. All steeled themselves for the fresh horrors that the new year would bring.