French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way

Tomb of Maréchal Foch, Les Invalides

Edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott 

Pen & Sword Military, 2023

Roy A. Prete, Reviewer

This book is designed to fill a significant gap in the literature on French generals who led the French Army to victory in the First World War and to assess how they adapted strategically, operationally, and tactically to the changed condition of industrial war. Drawing on the rich material now available in French military and political archives, this pioneer volume, written by a team of experts, gives us a fresh appraisal of the performance of 12 French generals, from the highest to less prominent levels of command.

To those schooled in the notion that the French Army started out in the First World War with a mistaken idea of modern warfare—that the appropriate response to increased firepower was l’offensive à outrance—and was slow to adapt to the demands of the new industrial warfare of the 20th century, the subtitle, “Leading the Way,” in this volume on French generals may come as a surprise. But interpretations have changed, particularly over the last two decades. The publication in 2003 of Anthony Clayton’s Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914–18 gave a quite favorable portrayal of the performance of the French Army in the First World War, while the paradigm-changing volume of Michel Goya in 2004, La chair et l’acier: l’armée francaise et l’invention de la guerre moderne (1914–1918) (available in translation since 2018), affirmed that “France created the first modern army” with more tanks and airplanes in 1918 than any other.

Appraisals of the performance of the French Army and the quality of its leadership have continued to rise since these publications, with the outstanding scholarly studies by Robert A. Doughty and Elizabeth Greenhalgh on the French Army in the First World War, and the latter’s excellent tome on Ferdinand Foch.  The French Army, in fact, was the mainstay of the Entente coalition, and even after the mutinies of 1917, played a decisive role in 1918, in repelling German advances north of the Somme and on the Marne and in the subsequent Allied march to victory.

The transformed army was able to respond to German infiltration tactics, and with its British and American allies, smash through German trenches in a victorious counteroffensive. In this optic, the performance of French generals, their challenges, their defeats and their triumphs, and their adaptation to the new conditions of trench warfare is entirely apropos.

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Distinguished British scholars Jonathan Krause and William Philpott have originated and edited this notable volume. Krause, who is known for his work on the development of French tactics in the Second Battle of Artois in 1915, fittingly wrote the chapter on General Philippe Pétain. Known for his extensive publications on the First World War, including Anglo-French command relations, attrition warfare and his two books on the Battle of the Somme, Philpott has contributed four chapters on French generals, including those on Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French Army through 1916 and Marie Émile Fayolle, who was Army Group Commander next to the British Army in 1918. In a first-rate introductory chapter, the book’s editors explore in detail the “Leadership and Learning” process of battlefield experience, the evaluation of successes and failures, and adaptations that lay at the base of the transformation of the French Army. Their assessment is that, given the size of the problems associated with the maneuver of mass armies and the increased firepower on the battlefield, these leaders used a fruitful method of assimilating evidence learned from courses taught at the École supérièure de guerre [Superior War College] to develop the tactics, tactical organisation, technologies and logistics to breach the trenches and restore movement on the battlefield. . . 

While this treatment of 12 generals does not exhaust the list of French generals who contributed significantly to the French war effort, it provides a major contribution to the literature representing the “range, ability and achievement of the men who led France and her allies to victory” (p. x).

Roy A. Prete

Source: Prete, Roy A. Review of  French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way  edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott. Canadian Military History 33, 1 (2024)