The Sneeze

It was once noted that when France sneezed, the rest of Europe caught a cold. Indeed, this statement was born of a century in which France spent most of it’s time in one kind of revolution or another. While much ado has been made about the social and economic revolution of Great Britain, what was going on in France has only, generally, been examined when bloodshed was the result. That could simply be the result of the fact that France was far less peaceful, at least compared to Great Britain, in it’s transition to a modern nation state, or, maybe it was a result of the fact that Britain was better at selling itself. Either way, the fact is that outside of France, few people dig that deeply into the collage of change that had been transforming France for the better part of a century.

It is true that most people know about key events that took place in France but, seldom, in the English speaking world at least, does anyone dig beneath it’s surface. The chain of events that took place in Paris of 1901 is yet another good example of this. Due to the events in Canada, where many Canadians claim credit for these events, most look on “The Mutiny” as some grand gesture of peace when, in fact, it was nothing of the sort. While there are some who will be offended by this, the fact is that some stereotypes are born of at least a grain of truth. While this might drum up images of the laconic Frenchman, in reality, the stereotype here is one of the private soldier who has little regard for much more than his own comfort. There was no better place to get that than in Paris.

One particular fact that is often overlooked is that Georges Boulanger already had a desertion problem of monumental proportions. This is not the kind of desertion that is most often portrayed by peace hobbyists, that being of a disenfranchised soldier who is questioning the ideological validity of war itself. In reality, this kind of soldier is at best, extraordinarily rare and, more often than not, when one see’s examples of such they are usually the result of a carefully manufactured image. No, in this case, the problem was not with men running off never to return but, it was more a case of soldiers taking their own self approved vacations and their most popular destination was Paris.

The destination speaks a great deal about the motives of the men who were now so commonly doing it that, in the ranks of the French Army, an unofficial system of official desertion had sprung up and was generally managed at the sergeant level. This system was usually, very discriminately, over looked by officers who were smart enough to realize that they were powerless to stop it. Such was the life in an army of citizen soldiers and this is really the key here. While it is true that some of these men went home the vast majority did not. That is saying quite a bit when you consider that some of these men were closer to their own homes than Paris, yet they chose the City of Lights instead.

This should tell you what these “deserters” were usually interested in. The Parisian Bordello and Salon industry was quite literally booming due to the war. Most of these soldiers would spend a few days on their semi/self appointed leave, doing what it is that soldiers are most famous for in such circumstances, and then return to the front lines. There were, of course, some who either stayed longer or never went back at all. In the case of the latter, it was quite often due to the fact that these true deserters had found a niche in the night life of Paris where they were either making money or had a social standing much greater than in the army.

While much political hay has been made of this in the twentieth century, the fact is that what was going on in France was nothing unusual. It was, in fact, something that every army in the world was dealing with in one capacity or another and, more important, this problem had existed in every war in recorded history. The French General Staff, and this included Boulanger himself, were well aware of the desertion rates and completely unalarmed. There had been a suggestion of trying the time honored custom of decimation where, basically, they shot ten percent of their army to restore order. Since the desertion rates themselves were at less than ten percent this idea was quickly dismissed since loosing ten percent of their military in attempt to recover five seemed rather ludicrous.

For that reason, the French policy actually swung dramatically in the other direction. Like much of what was going on in France, at the time, Boulanger simply chose to ignore the situation to almost an extreme. It was so bad in fact that a deserter, on his Parisian getaway, could actually report to the war ministry and collect his pay check while he was there. This might sound absurd but, again, one has to remember that at his core, General Revenge was more General than Revenge. He was a military man and understood the nature of armies and war. He knew this was so normal that many militaries had to invent another term for the behavior which was, most commonly, called Absent Without Leave.

The real danger here went beyond the management of an army and this is truly what Boulanger had ignored to his own detriment. It is true that the numbers of deserters, that were gone from the front at any given moment, were growing. It was equally true that the duration of time that these men took in Paris was also growing as well. It is also very true that the number of men who decided to take up a permanent residence was starting to drastically increase. These facts are well known but, what usually does not get reported is why. The duration of the war certainly played it’s part but, the evidence seems to point towards the fact that the desertion industry was not only organizing but, expanding and branching out into new financial opportunities for those who were in a position to exploit them. Most of the time these financial opportunists were enterprising deserters.

While some of these soldiers did open businesses and, as we shall see, it was one such soldier that led to the mutiny, the real effect of this bizarre chapter of the war was that the desertion community of Paris was starting to take on a very permanent feel. In the beginning it was treated as nothing more than a diversion that seemed as temporary as the war did. By 1901 that had changed and it was directly impacting the lives of the citizens of Paris in some very real ways. While Paris has quite the reputation for being a “party city” the truth of the matter is that most Parisians are no different from any other citizens of any other city. That is to say that, they work, they sleep, and they wish to raise their children with as little complications to their lives as possible.

The desertion problem was impacting the average Parisian far more than the army since, while it is true that most soldiers of this period were solid citizens, a good number of them, like in the population at large, were just plain thugs. Now they were thugs with guns and trained to use violence, of which many had no problem doing so on their own fellow Frenchmen. The usual motives for these incidents was theft and crime was skyrocketing in Paris as a result. The citizens of Paris were petitioning both their local officials and the national government to do something about it. What they got for their efforts was what Boulanger was becoming most famous for, silence.

Of course, this did not cause the mutiny which had it’s seeds on the other end of the spectrum. Since the start of the war, most of the soldiers who had slipped off for a few days of fun would return to their units. Once back they did what all soldiers do, in such circumstances, they told tall tales and lied their asses off about the big one that got away. In this case, the “big one” was usually a well endowed prostitute with an even bigger bottle of wine. Some of these stories became legendary and the names of those involved, as well as the exaggerations, changed with each retelling. By 1901 these stories were no longer confined to the troops on the front lines. Some of them had managed to even make the newspapers, even if they only received a by line on some back page. What these articles do prove, despite their seeming unimportance, is that these tales were everywhere.

What is absolutely true is that the men of the 401^st Infantry Regiment, a unit that was largely conscripted in the Normandy area in the early fall of 1900, had heard a great many tales of these Parisian adventures. The irony of this is that they learned of this from the very men who trained them in a camp just outside of Orleans. Most of their officers and sergeants were men who had been serving, for some time, and almost all of them had partaken in the unofficial leave system that was now so common. The tales of women and wine certainly inspired the men more than guts and grit.

The problem that followed was largely due to the French rail service. Here, the problem was two fold and the first one was the volume of traffic the system was being taxed with due to the war. Delays were common, even for troop trains, and actual rails were greatly in need of servicing. This was not due to a lack of resources or trained professionals to fix the rails. The problem was more due to the fact that so much traffic was passing on them there was no time to do so. The schedules demanded by the Ministry of War were unrealistic to begin with and, largely for this reason, French Rail officials were unwilling to take any section of track out of service for something as mundane as routine maintenance.

The other reason for the railroad’s involvement in this is simply that almost all the lines in Northern France, converge on multiple points in the environs of the Parisian Metropolitan Area. For many provincial French soldiers, a trip to an army camp or the front lines was the very first time they had actually seen this jewel of French culture known as Paris. Given the stories that were now circulating, for a great many of them, it was simply too much. This certainly proved to be true for many in the 401^st Infantry who found themselves stuck on a train platform for six hours.

In more normal times, the men of this regiment could have traveled from Orleans to Nancy in half the time that they were just sitting on this platform doing nothing. They would also have been riding in cars with seats instead of the box cars they had been shoved into. It was summer, there was very little ventilation in the cars, and despite the wishes of their regimental commander, there was no way to keep them in the cars while they were delayed in Paris. There was very little wonder that these men were restless, having just completed their basic training, and all the while they sat in a spot that gave them a view of the top of the Eifel Tower. There was more than a little chatter about going to see the rest of it.

This chatter remained idle but, by the sixth hour on the platform several men with vendors carts showed up on a nearby platform. These men were selling cigarettes and snacks. As it happened, they were also some long time deserters who specialized in selling such items to other deserters who were fresh off the train from the front. The leader of this little band had been a sergeant and, this meant he knew how to talk to the troops. He seemed to hold much sway over fresh conscripts that were drifting his way in dribs and drabs to purchase his smokes. What this former Sergeant was also selling was advertising for a collection of Bordello’s and Salon’s that gave him a kick back for every patron that dropped his name.

Naturally, the green troops had been told they were restricted to the one platform but, the fact that they were walking over to the next one to purchase cigarettes had been largely ignored. It turned out to be a mistake because, once that invisible line had been crossed, combined with the monumental tales from the deserter/merchant, it was not too long before men were slipping away from the rail yard and searching for entertainment. When their train was given the green light to leave, their officers were horrified to discover that nearly three quarters of a battalion of men had left. The regimental staff was even more horrified to learn that a good number of the men who had drifted off were also officers.

Had the regiment actually handled this in the normal manner, that of down playing the problem, it is likely that this incident would have been swept under the rug. The problem here is that their colonel was looking at the end of his career and decided to handle the situation on his own. The result was an empty troop train leaving for the front that would not go unnoticed in Nancy. That alone would send chills up the spines of the General Staff once they learned of it. The other problem was in Paris itself. The colonel quickly rounded up some of his more dependable officers and sergeants, as well as some of the local military and civilian police. He then began a hunting expedition for his missing men. It was an impossible task in a city filled with uniforms and, given the fact that more than a few of those wearing them were not authorized to be there, it was a potentially dangerous task as well.

Now all of the factors were coming to a head. The sudden appearance of authority, hell bent on their mission, alarmed a great number of deserters and began yet another rumor mill that uttered a single word that tingled spines. That word was decimation. This convinced a good number of deserters to flee the city and many of them did not attempt to go back to the front. There were also any number of deserters who were both panicked and found they had no place to retreat too. These men were armed and it was inevitable that some shooting would begin. Once that line was crossed the citizens of Paris had reached their limit. More than one mob was reported to be roaming the streets, looking for stray soldiers, and hanging them from lamp posts.

By the time that the street lamps should have been lit, it was too dangerous to do so. It did not help that another German bombing raid hit the city as tempers were already flared. The bombs also did nothing to quell the sudden violence as these riots began to grow. Political agitators, who had been waiting for just such an event, helped fan the flames and added fuel to the fire. Still, despite the wide spread violence, like in any riot, the majority of the citizens did not participate. Most of them were staying home and hoping not to become involved in a war that had suddenly appeared, quite literally, at their front door. For most of these people, there was only one question on their lips, “where is General Revenge?”