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| The Siege of Paris, 1871 by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier |
By Charles W. Sanders, Jr.
The Disgrace of Sedan
The search for doctrine was a major occupation of the best minds in the French Army at the turn of this century. Intelligent, dedicated and experienced French officers in major commands, on the faculty of the Ecole de Guerre and on the General Staff, studied the histories of past conflicts and the likely characteristics of future ones; thought and debated various options; and—in near consensus—developed and promulgated a clearly defined doctrine which was splendidly executed by French soldiers in the opening battles of the Great War. Unfortunately, it was exactly the wrong doctrine for the French Army to employ in 1914. It was a doctrine which very nearly resulted in the death of France. . .
The search for doctrine by the French Army did not begin in the glamour and swirl that was France at the turn of the century. It began in 1870. In that year, the dull, gray Prussian mass crushed the descendants of the great Bonaparte in a war which lasted just six weeks. The completeness of the disgrace and bewilderment of the nation which considered itself to be the premiere warrior race of Europe was epitomized by Louis Napoleon himself, trailing sick and defeated through Metz, jeered by old soldiers along the route, on his way to captivity in Germany.
The disgrace of the defeat was surpassed only by the harshness of Prussian peace terms. France was to surrender Lorraine and Alsace, two of her richest provinces, and pay reparations to the Prussians on a scale never before demanded. There was even to be constructed on the Siegerstrasse in Berlin a Victory Column topped with the mighty figure of Germania victorious. The column was to be garnished with scores of captured French cannons—dipped in captured French gold. All this was—for the French Army—too much to bear. The degradation would not be forgotten. The spirit of revanche was born.
The French recovery from the war was as rapid and complete as the war had been terrible. The stale, inhibiting monarchy of the Second Empire was expunged and, by the time of the Paris exposition in 1878, the Prussian Army of Occupation had departed. The hated reparations payments were being paid off ahead of schedule and Paris again was a city of light, gaiety, and excitement. A new sense of confidence was in the land. Nowhere was this sense of confidence more evident than in the Army. In response to the poor showing of the French General Staff during the war significant reforms had been enacted. The Ecole de Guerre was established in 1875 and selection for attendance was by merit.
Graduates, following the German model, would form the État Major de 1'Armee (the General Staff) and would alternate assignments between line and staff positions. The "fops" of the Second Empire were replaced by dedicated young officers who sought to learn from the past and possessed a passion for the study of the profession of arms. Gone were the days when MacMahon had threatened to "remove from the promotion list any officer whose name I read on the cover of a book." Many old Army values and standards changed as well. But the thirst for revenge remained.
George Gilbert
Part and parcel of the new spirit in the Army was the grim determination to set right the damage done to its honor. French officers, whose forefathers were at Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland, awaited impatiently the opportunity to redeem their honor, to dispel the clouds of 1870 and to show that theirs was again a first class army.
This preoccupation with things military extended beyond those in uniform. The government, after great debate, voted to spend considerable treasure to construct a barrier of forts to replace the natural barriers of the Rhine and the Vosges lost in 1870 along with Alsace and Lorraine. In the arts, the paintings of de Neuville and Detaille (unlike the painting at the top of this page) depicted in beautiful detail the bravery, sense of duty, sacrifice, and above all, the gloire of the French soldier. The poetry of Deroulede exalted "the bugler who sounds the charge." A government sponsored committee was established to recommend a program of military and patriotic education in French schools. Deroulede, selected as a member, saw the job of the committee as one of converting "the youth of our schools into a legion of brave Frenchmen" who would "follow the cult of the flag" and develop a true "taste for arms." Al1 of this was underpinned by the popular philosophy of Henri Bergson with its emphasis on élan vital.
By the nineties, Captain George Gilbert, a member of the first graduating class of the new Ecole de Guerre, who had retired from the army due to medical problems, had become a highly visible commentator on military affairs. Prior to his illness, Gilbert was considered a future leader of the Army. His message was uncomplicated. He taught that the primary responsibility for the defeat of 1870 lay in the French Army's defensive state of mind, which had allowed the Germans to gain and maintain moral superiority throughout the war. This, quite simply, was the reason for the loss and the problem could be easily corrected.
Gilbert spoke and the Army listened. He told his eager listeners that defensive thought and defensive action alone had cost France the victory. His words were calming and soothing to an army that desperately wanted to believe in itself and to be told that everything was all right. Gilbert's ideas became the ideas of the Ecole de Guerre. He coined the phrase furia francaise and the initials "G.G." were the most famous in all military writings of the time.
But Gilbert was no longer on the active list. A serving officer of some influence was needed to preach the ideas within the Army. This officer would have to be a soldier of considerable intellectual stature, and he would need an official forum from which to preach. The perfect officer for this role turned out to be Ferdinand Foch. His forum was to be no less than the Supreme War College, the Ecole de Guerre.
Ferdinand Foch
Foch attended the Ecole de Guerre in 1885 and, only nine years later, in 1894, was assigned to the school as Professor of Strategy and Tactics. He served as an instructor for six years and was easily one of the most popular instructors at the school. Dapper, full of daring ideas and a fiery speaker, he rapidly attracted a devoted following of the brightest students at the college. In 1901 he ran afoul of the post-Dreyfus "Catholic bashing" of Minister of War Louis Andre and was relieved of his post. He would return to the college a scant six years later, this time as commandant.
In his lectures Foch, who had always dealt extensively in mystique, now blended the spiritual views of elan and esprit as expressed by Gilbert with the teachings of the philosophers Joseph de Maistre and Kolmar von der Goltz. "Victory = Will" was the centerpiece of his teachings. He told his students that battle was a struggle between two wills and the only time a battle was lost when one believed it was lost. Therefore, battles could be won as long as one did not believe himself beaten. Modern battle, even with its new weapons of great destruction, would be no different. From a narrow reading and interpretation of the works of Du Picgq, Foch took the notion that "No enemy awaits you if you are determined and never are there two equal determinations." He conveniently ignored Du Picq's admonition that in any equation of wills the will of the enemy should not be forgotten.
Foch did not teach that the "blind offensive" was the answer in all cases. In his two books, The Conduct of War and Principles of War, he wrote extensively of flexibility, security, and economy of forсе. He believed that the commander who immediately went into action at all points upon sighting the enemy would rapidly face stalemate because he would have no reserve forces with which to exploit the situation as it developed. Rather, he said, the commander should economize his forces and strike with his reserve at the point of enemy weakness. This would maintain the "will to conquer" of his men.
Some historians today argue that Foch never intended to become the "priest" of the offensive à outrance which he—in fact—became at the Ecole de Guerre. Indeed, he himself later maintained that his thoughts had been misinterpreted, and in the midst of the slaughter of the initial battles of the war he cried out that all this was not what he intended. History, however, can be a cruel judge, and the fact is that it was Foch who started the fire at the Ecole de Guerre.
Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison
The impact of the teachings of Foch was enormous. By 1914 the majority of the hundreds of students he had taught at the Ecole de Guerre, the best and the brightest of the French Army, commanded divisions and brigades or held senior staff positions. Among these was a favorite pupil, Major Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison. In 1906 de Grandmaison, predictably, was assigned to the General Staff. In the same year he published a book, his second, entitled Dressage de L'Infanterie en vue du Combat Offensif (Infantry Training for Offensive Combat). Using both his experiences as a commander in combat and his own study of the recently completed Russo-Japanese War, de Grandmaison concluded that the direct offensive was still the best tactic and that the primary reason [for its outcome] was the Japanese offensive spirit.
The argument has been made that there was another, more prudent side to de Grandmaison and that crediting him as the chief disciple of the offensive à outrance is unfair. While it is true that he, on occasion, displayed a more logical and realistic approach to tactics, de Grandmaison did not display these aspects of his thought for general public consumption. The words that did reach the public [and most of the army] were unequivocal: "For the attack, only two things are necessary; to know where the enemy is and to decide what to do. What the enemy intends to do is of no consequence. " The mission of the French forces was simple. They were to ". . . charge the enemy with the bayonet in order to destroy him (realizing that). . . this result can be obtained only at the price of bloody sacrifice. All other conceptions should be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war. What of plans? No plans were needed. One had only to locate and then "fly at the throats of the enemy." What of security? De Grandmaison answered that "imprudence is the best security. To Liddell Hart it was a theory "based on the sentimental assumption that Frenchmen were braver than Germans." "The strategy of the matador," he said, "had been replaced with the strategy of the bull."
Still, the ideas of the offensive à outrance spread slowly until February 1911 when, in a single stroke, de Grandmaison was able to wed the French Army irrevocably to its fate. In that year General Victor Michel, Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, proposed a radical change in Plan XVI, the existing French war-fighting plan. Without getting into the specifics, to the disciples of the school of the offensive, this proposal was completely unacceptable for two reasons. First, it proposed the use of reservists in front-line assignments. The spirit of the old long service professional army was still very much alive and the regulars harbored feelings of both distrust and jealousy toward reservists "Citizen soldiers" were seen to be "unfit" for the furious offensive operations planned by the General Staff. They lacked the unquestioning zeal needed to wage war with the bayonet. Anyway, they would not be required. The war, although sure to be bloody, was going to be a short one decided in the first violent battles by regular troops attacking always and everywhere.
Second, the proposal called for the [temporary] abandonment of large portions of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lands which had assumed an almost mystical quality since they had been "stolen" by the Prussians in 1870.
De Grandmaison, now a Lieutenant Colonel, and the Chief of the Troisieme (operations) Bureau in the war ministry, seized upon the debate surrounding Michel's proposed plan to precipitate a rebellion of the "Young Turks." He scheduled and delivered two lectures at the new Center of Higher War Studies in which he called not only for the rejection of Michel's plan, but for Army-wide acceptance of the offensive à outrance doctrine as well. He argued passionately that what France needed to fight the Germans was a doctrine which had as its centerpiece the straightforward offensive, an offensive to the bitter end, every man's offensive, to be conducted simultaneously and everywhere. There was no further need for complex movement of and no need forces, for the use of reservists. Instinct was superior to intelligence.
The effect of de Grandmaison's lectures was electric and he succeeded in his aims beyond his greatest hopes. Not only was Michel's plan defeated, but Michel himself, long held by the "Young Turks" to be an impediment to the new ideas sweeping the Army, was sacked. General Gallieni refused to serve as his replacement on the grounds that he had helped unseat Michel. General Pau, the government's second choice, was an ardent Catholic and therefore unacceptable to many of the deputies in the government.
Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre
By default, the position then went to Joseph Joffre, the government's third choice as Commander-in-Chief and an enthusiastic supporter of the new doctrine. De Grandmaison, selected for command of the 153rd Infantry Regiment at Toul, could depart for his command knowing that there would be no turning back now. Doctrine and supporting regulations and plans would be rewritten. The way was clear for the doctrine of the offensive à outrance to become law.
All that now remained was for the new doctrine to be codified and institutionalized within the Army. This was accomplished by the release three important documents in 1913 and 1914: The Regulations for the Conduct of Large Units (28 Оctober 1913), The Decree on the Service of Armies in the Field (2 December 1913) and The Regulations for Infantry of Maneuver (20 April 1914).
Joffre brought these about following his dissatisfaction with the army's grand maneuvers of 1913. He assessed the Army to be in a poor state of readiness in several key areas. What was needed, he felt, were regulations that were more prescriptive and left no room for misinterpretation or doubt. Further, the new regulations should reflect the new mood in the Army, the mood best expressed by de Grandmaison. Under the new regulations, old ideas were to be discarded: "The passive defense is doomed to certain defeat; it is to be absolutely precluded." He approved a new war strategy, "Plan XVII", based on the new principles.
When war came in 1914, the French soldiers fought exactly as they had been trained. Upon meeting an enemy force, they attacked, full of the furia francaise, and without regard to the enemy situation. During a single day (22 August 1914) the French Army suffered 27,000 fatalities, more than the British Army on its legendary "First Day of the Somme." Major General Edward Spears, then a British liaison to Joffre's staff, was present at the slaughter of August 1914. He wrote later: "The senses of the tragic futility of it will never quite fade from the minds of those who saw these brave men, dashing across the open to the sound of drums and bugles. . ." During August 1914 the French army suffered over 300,000 casualties (a conservative estimate of killed, wounded, and captured), in the spirit of offensive à outrance.
Après le Déluge
What of those individuals most responsible for the failed Doctrine of the offensive à outrance?
- Former Captain George Gilbert lived until 1901(?). [Editor's note. I've not discovered anything online or in my personal library comparing the actual events of the war with his theories. Possibly, this is due to the broad discrediting of his ideas.]
- Colonel Ferdinand Foch, provided brilliant leadership during the Battle of the Marne, but he stuck with his relentless offensive tactics during the 1915 campaign. Eventually, he discarded the Offensive à Outrance about the time of the Battle of the Somme. He would be called upon to coordinate the Allied victory offensive of 1918 as Generalissimo. History would remember him as the greatest French general of the war.
- Since his intervention in the war planning had been generally favorably received, Lt. Colonel Louis de Grandmaison's rapid career advancement continued when he returned to line service. He was commander of the 153rd Regiment when war broke out and managed to get wounded three times within 24 hours. Nevertheless, he was promoted again to the command of the Fifth Army Reserve Group. On 18 February 1915, while inspecting front-line trenches near Soissons, Grandmaison was struck in the head by shrapnel from an exploding German artillery shell. He died the following day at the age of 54, becoming a casualty of the brutal, high-firepower trench warfare that his prewar tactical doctrines had deemed impossible.
- General Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, continued to serve as Commander-in-Chief of French forces from the start of World War I until the end of 1916. His reputation today remains stellar because of his masterful leadership in changing the course of the war at the Battle of the Marne. His subsequent Western Front operations of 1915, however, showed he still had faith in Élan, and an underappreciation of the killing power of artillery. In 1915 alone, the French Army suffered approximately 349,000 deaths, its worst year of the Great War.
Source: Excerpted from "NO OTHER LAW: THE FRENCH ARMY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE OFFENSIVE," Charles W. Sanders, Jr., March 1987, RAND Corporation
