FEUDAL VALOR, A REASON FOR THE CARNAGE OF WORLD WAR 1?

THE IDEAL OF VALOR WAS TRANSMITTED.
THE BRAKES ON IT WERE NOT

The cult of frontal mass attacks

 -- "l'offensive à l'outrance" --

dominated France's High Command through April 1917,

though barbed wire and machine guns

made significant success impossible

Poster of the time

• Nobles dominated the army and... 

° Carrying the flag into battle recalls the Crusades

Medieval manuscript

° Emphasis on glory is aristocratic
  

Title: "The splendors of glory" Hero: "The baron..."

° Uniforms are decorative and dangerous,
as were the accoutrements of knights

Magazine cover, April 1915

* No helmets (caps only, for cheering).

* Red trouser, ideal targets.

* The uniform was adopted in 1830, when shots that covered only 200 meters made concealment pointless. But when a change to grey-green was proposed in 1912, the  Minister of War bellowed, "the red trousers are France!"

-- The guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, 1979

* In August 1915 the color did change -- to light blue.

• Does the feudal tradition of reckless courage
explain four years of hopeless attacks

by the European armies,
and their initial rejection of tanks? 

Americans, on the other hand, changed strategy after a single blood bath (the battle of Belleau Wood, in July 1918): but they had no nobles or feudal past.

The least sensible uniforms and most lyrical declarations were French. An attempt to make the absurd doctrine rational: emphasis on élan, the wish to win, and cran, courage, as replies to Germany's greater population and more advanced industry. 

-- Tuchman, 48

The small farms that underlie France's relatively slow industrialisation are a better explanation of an ancestral mentality's persistence.  

 The offensives stop only when mutinies
 affect half the French army

Paths of glory

Three films deal with shootings "as examples:" Paths of glory by Stanley Kubrick (1957, forbidden in France until 1975),  Pantalon (1997, French video) and Les fusillés by Yves Boissent (2015).

The plots of these movies take place before 1917:
The mutinies have still not been brought up directly. 

End of this chapter.
The next chapters apply the economic and anthropological approach
to transformations in Africa and France.

*       *      * 

Next chapter,
V, 3. 
Growth and African cycles of stability and war