Minotaur: French Military Justice and the Aernoult-Rousset Affair

Minotaur

French Military Justice and the Aernoult-Rousset Affair

John Cerullo

NIU Press DeKalb

© 2011 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States.

All Rights Reserved

Design by Shaun Allshouse

First digital edition, 2011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cerullo, John J., 1949–

Minotaur : French military justice and the Aernoult-Rousset affair / John Cerullo.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-433-0 (clothbound : alk. paper)

E-ISBN 978-1-60909-051-7

1. Courts-martial and courts of inquiry—France—History—20th century. I. Title.

KJV7568.C47 2010

343.44'0143—dc22

2010019102

To Shawn

Simply the best

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1—L’Armée, c’est la Nation

2—The Theory and Practice of French Military Justice

3—The View from the Left

4—The Dreyfus Affair and the Debate over Military Justice

5—Can the Judge of Liberty Be the Judge of Obedience?

6—Djennan-ed-Dar, 1909

7—The Aernoult-Rousset Affair—Terms of Engagement

8—Triumph of the Political

9—The Rousset Murder Case

10—Breaking Codes

11—Glory to Rousset

12—Marmande Agonistes

Afterword—Theseus Unbound

Appendix A—Judicial Dossier of Émile Rousset

Appendix B—General Rabier’s Report

Appendix C—Lieutenant Pan-Lacroix’s Report

Appendix D—Les Temps Nouveaux

Notes to Introduction

Notes to Chapter 1

Notes to Chapter 2

Notes to Chapter 3

Notes to Chapter 4

Notes to Chapter 5

Notes to Chapter 6

Notes to Chapter 7

Notes to Chapter 8

Notes to Chapter 9

Notes to Chapter 10

Notes to Chapter 11

Notes to Chapter 12

Notes to Afterwords

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life. Compiling this list of acknowledgments has been one of the most humbling. In recalling just how many people contributed to this project, and how vital those contributions were, I have been reminded of something I thought I had known but apparently had forgotten: there is no such thing as solitary creation.

I’ll begin with the invaluable assistance provided me by my university and college. A grant from the University of New Hampshire’s Center for the Humanities enabled me to begin writing this book, in the spring of 2008. A sabbatical granted by my own college, UNH–Manchester, enabled me to finish the following fall, just as prior sabbaticals had enabled me to research it. I have spent my entire academic career at UNH–Manchester, and I am enormously grateful for that privilege. It is a place where collegiality is more than a word.

At the beginning of this undertaking, I received crucial help with French translations from Ed Dobe, one of the college’s language instructors. Later, I received invaluable criticism and feedback on early drafts (several drafts, that is) from a number of colleagues and friends at the college: Dan Reagan, Jack Resch, and Terry Savage. I also received wonderful conversation and counsel from Jeff Haight; and Karla Vogel’s patience with a techno-dolt went way beyond the call of duty. And I was supported every step of the way by college administrators Pete Haebler, Karol LaCroix, Dan Reagan, and Kristin Woolever.

I owe special thanks to the faculty and staff of Oudens Library at UNHM. My debt to Ginger Borase and Cindy Tremblay, in particular, is simply incalculable.

Colleagues and friends at UNH’s main campus were enormously helpful, as well. I’m deeply grateful for political scientist John Kayser’s feedback and ongoing support. I’m grateful, as well, for what faculty and administrators in UNH’s Justice Studies program—Ellen Cohn, Charles Putnam, Kevin Souza, Ted Kirkpatrick—gave me, which was more than they themselves may realize. In inviting me to direct the Justice Studies Budapest Program in the fall of 2007, they gave me the opportunity to reflect on the basic themes of this book and to test my ideas in discussion with an absolutely splendid set of students. I will never forget that experience, or what those students did for me.

This study was really motivated by a deep fascination with the nexus of law and politics, a fascination I developed during my year as a visiting scholar at Boston College Law School. If I have thought with anything resembling lucidity on that subject, I owe it to the outstanding teacher/scholars I met there: Charles Buzzy Baron, Catharine Welles, Neil Hecht, Dan Kanstroom, and Scott Fitzgibbon. I was also fortunate enough to meet Michel Troper at BC Law, whose encouragement and suggestions were vital as I began entering into the study of French legal thought and practice.

I am grateful, also, to a wonderfully supportive set of friends and mentors in the larger world of historical scholarship, French and other. Wendy Perry provided crucial assistance at a crucial juncture, without which the study would not have proceeded. It would certainly never have been completed without the support and counsel of Bill Irvine, whose encouragement was invaluable. Chris Forth also provided support at particularly important moments, and Paul Miller epitomized the term gentleman and scholar. Finally, my two oldest and best friends from graduate-school days at the University of Pennsylvania, Dale Light and Dan Sipe, both provided detailed, high-quality feedback on the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to both—for that, and for some thirty-five years of friendship.

I simply cannot say enough about the skill and dedication of the archivists, librarians, and scholars who assisted me in France: at the Archives Nationales; the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Préfecture de Police de Paris; and especially at the Service Historique de Défense archives, in Vincennes. It was Madame Claude Ponnou of the SHD who located the judicial dossier of Émile Rousset—the key to this entire study. M. Jean-Paul Bodin, Archival Director of the Ministry of Defense, then granted me permission to examine it. I owe a great deal, as well, to Commandant Gérard Croutte, of the Section justice militaire at Vincennes, who not only provided me with invaluable secondary sources but gave unstintingly of his time as a sounding board for my ideas. And I benefited enormously from conversation with historian Michel Cordillot, who challenged my thinking at a time when it needed to be challenged.

I want to express special appreciation to personnel at CPEDERF (Paris) for the many varieties of help they provided over the many years this study has extended. This splendid organization offers a range of services to scholars and others with business in France; and I availed myself of nearly all of them, at one time or another. To co-director David Bancroft and to staff members Julia McLaren, Bronwen Pugsley, and Amandine Agic I will simply say: this book would not have happened without you.

Nor would it have happened without the support of some very special French friends. I will not forget Virginia Dae’s many kindnesses toward a stranger in Paris, or her encyclopedic knowledge of the city. And what Imelda and Pierre Gaudissart have given me is just impossible to exaggerate. Their hospitality, their conversation, their encouragement—in a word, their friendship—sustained this study more directly and tangibly than they will ever know. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to know them, and their family.

In fact, personal relationships have provided no less vital forms of support in this undertaking than grants, sabbaticals, or any other form of institutional assistance. I will therefore conclude by mentioning the most vital.

There is, always, the memory of my parents, whose gifts were and remain foundational. There is the memory of Jack Reece, of Penn, who introduced me to the drama of French history. There is my brother, Len, and my sister, Carol, and their families, all of whom I cherish. There is the delightful family into which I have been fortunate enough to marry, the Finnegans.

Above all there is my wife, Shawn—who loved me enough to tolerate my long absences in Paris and to see me through the difficult times. I simply do not have the words to express what I feel when I think of what she has given me.

Introduction

On the evening of July 2, 1909, an obscure French soldier named Albert Aernoult was found dead in a cell of the military penal camp of Djennan-ed-Dar in Algeria. Earlier that day Aernoult had endured a special punishment detail in a sandy courtyard (the Court of Miracles) reserved for such things at that camp. According to officers, he had been healthy enough at the conclusion of his punishment, later dying unexpectedly of a stroke. Fellow prisoners, however, told a very different story. By their account, Aernoult had been beaten to death by the officers who had conducted his punishment detail. One of those prisoners, Émile Rousset, would try to amplify that claim by raising it before a court-martial he deliberately provoked.

French antimilitarists would rally behind Rousset, generating that distinctive set of events by which particular incidents (often juridical in origin) are periodically elevated to the status of grand public Affaires in France: impassioned public demonstrations, heated editorial comment, gripping ancillary trials, tense parliamentary exchanges. This particular tumult had more than the usual quota of twists and turns. A particularly dramatic one was Rousset’s own indictment for murder in August 1911at another Algerian camp—whereupon the entire matter took on special urgency for both his defenders and his prosecutors.

The Aernoult and Rousset cases would take very winding paths toward resolution. Yet the basic question they raised was straightforward from the very beginning. They called the theory, structure, and practices of French military justice to public account. That exceptional jurisdiction administered by the army had been the subject of intense debate long before these particular cases came to public attention. In fact, the controversy over military justice had reached a boiling point in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair: some twenty-one proposals for its reform had been brought before the legislature between 1899 and 1909. This was a quintessentially belle époque controversy, inflected with social and political concerns specific to the time (e.g., the state of the class struggle, the peculiarly exalted status of the French army). But its roots reached back to earlier periods, and its implications extend to our own.

Those roots lay in the history and, especially, the organization of French military justice. The exceptional jurisdiction was not some barbaric relic of the Ancien Régime, as some critics charged. On the contrary, no unitary, separate military jurisdiction—special laws, courts, and prisons devoted exclusively to regulating the internal order of the military—had existed before the onset of the great revolution in 1789. In fact, the army’s exceptional jurisdiction was at first deeply imprinted with revolutionaries’ new, enlightened juridical standards, which included close monitoring by the civilian political order.

By the time of the system’s full and formal instantiation in 1857, however, most of that revolutionary-era heritage had been shed. The officers who actually administered military justice had by then secured an immunity to political intrusions (and public oversight) that was genuinely remarkable in a nation where the idea of judicial independence would be deeply mistrusted well into the twentieth century. That immunity was secured under the general terms of a tacit civil-military compact that had evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, as France embarked on her own long, often violent path to full democracy. Basically, that compact amounted to civilian political authorities’ conferral on the army of a privileged role within the state, including a grant of near total autonomy regarding its own internal operations, in return for the army’s willingness to defend the regime from domestic insurgents as well as foreign enemies. Not surprisingly, this arrangement grew increasingly problematic as democracy and the principle of state accountability to citizens rooted themselves. With the apparent consolidation of the Third Republic around the end of the nineteenth century, something resembling a paradigm shift in overall civil-military relations seemed to be in the offing. That shift was denoted by the catchphrase "L’Armée, c’est la Nation (The Army is the Nation"). The essential idea was that the army was to be folded more fully into the nation; its institutions and practices, including those of military justice, were to be reconfigured to mirror more closely modern republican notions of what the nation stood for. To all appearances, the French army’s days of isolation and unaccountability were nearing an end—and to fin de siècle French leftists in particular, that was a heartening prospect.

To them, the entire civil-military compact had been an engine of class oppression from the beginning. In light of the army’s interventions in the revolutions of 1830, 1848, 1871, and in scores of lesser disturbances since then, they could hardly have thought otherwise. Their animus against military justice, in particular, ran deep. Indeed, when Socialist deputy and journalist Gustave Rouanet described the military jurisdiction as a judicial minotaur in early 1907, he didn’t need to elaborate the analogy.¹ Most readers, he knew, would understand.

With its human body and bull’s head, the mythological minotaur was a freakish admixture of the familiar and the monstrous—quite like the military jurisdiction, in critics’ eyes. Its courts might resemble ordinary courts; its judges might speak like ordinary judges; the law they administered might issue from more or less the same sources as ordinary law. But to leftists, the animating spirit of military justice was bestiality itself: unbounded cruelty and capriciousness, specifically designed to break working-class conscripts to the will of the bourgeois state. The minotaur of myth had a savage appetite for the youth of Athens, delivered by city elders to the beast’s nominal keeper, King Minos of Crete. And the weird abomination that was French military justice now consumed young French workers just as pitilessly. In fact, argued leftists, working-class French youth were now betrayed by their elders just as unconscionably as Athenian youth had been by theirs, and out of a similarly unholy regard for the beast’s master—in this case, the French army itself.

Defenders of the military jurisdiction had an altogether different view. They shared leftists’ perception of military justice as a hybrid form; ordinary law and ordinary judicial procedures, defenders recognized, had indeed been reconfigured to serve the extraordinary requirements of military discipline. But while leftists contended that subordinating legal forms to military purposes debased the very idea of law, many champions of the jurisdiction argued just the opposite. They claimed that military justice represented an elevated brand of justice precisely for having prioritized discipline and authority over and above the rights and liberties around which the civilian code revolved. That taurine head of the minotaur—the specifically military dimension of military justice—was to them its beauty, not its shame.

Military justice, argued its supporters, was structured around duty, not personal license; service to the fatherland, not security of property. Clearly, it was anything but arbitrary. Its procedures were superbly inflexible precisely because the brand of justice they delivered was superbly elemental. If the cleansing and ennobling quality of military discipline was so little appreciated in the civilian world, it was because of the appalling moral decline that had overtaken that world in recent decades. What was absolutely crucial, then, was that the Rouanets of France—the Socialists and their allies, the entire array of political forces now banging at the doors of the military jurisdiction and demanding it be remade in the image of civilian law—be resisted.

But to the oracles of military justice, the challenge was actually much deeper. It wasn’t just Socialists, or any particular set of political actors, who must be kept at bay. It was politics itself—the activity, the process denoted by the term. The ceaseless partisan strife, the anarchic contest of factions motivated by nothing beyond narrow, material interests, was the surest solvent of military order, discipline, and honor. It must therefore be denied any foothold, any avenue of entry into the military jurisdiction, the integrity of which simply could not survive its encroachments. To preclude those encroachments, to keep the entire world of politics at bay, the designers of French military justice had placed a formidable wall between the jurisdiction and the elected branches of government (parliament, cabinet ministries).

The entire Aernoult-Rousset agitation constituted a sustained assault on that wall—and herein lies its relevance for us today. For this Affair was essentially a test of both the practical feasibility and the philosophical viability of a basic and still highly significant juridico-moral proposition: that a particular juridical realm—a particular body of law, and the institutions specially designed to administer it—must be sealed utterly from the corrupting influence of politics; that whatever bridges serve to link other components of the legal order to the political universe from which they issued must, in this instance, be burned. For in this particular instance, a moral cornerstone of the entire society is at stake.

This proposition has lost none of its relevance. In fact, the seismic political events of the intervening century have rendered it ever more attractive, while (or perhaps by) shifting its general ideological connotations—conservative in the past, progressive now. We hear its echoes in certain debates in international law, such as those over the principle of universal jurisdiction and the International Criminal Court: champions of each labor tirelessly to construct and sustain jurisdictions that cannot be held hostage to the internal political dynamics of particular nation-states. We hear those echoes in the ongoing controversy over the rights revolution that has marked Western jurisprudence in recent decades: its defenders insist strenuously that political considerations be forever extruded from the allocation of rights they deem integral to human dignity itself. We hear the same echoes, in fact, whenever we are told that particular legal codes and/or jurisdictions represent the apex of civic morality and must therefore be more rigorously preserved than other legal quarters from the hard grasp of the demos.

Odd as it may seem, in formally juridical terms (i.e., divested of specific political agendas), the progressive position on these issues differs little from that taken by militarists who worked so hard to isolate France’s exceptional jurisdiction from the political universe in the decades before World War I. This really shouldn’t be so surprising. The idea that certain jurisdictions bear a special moral function and must not be made to suffer even light and indirect exposure to exogenous political currents is strong enough to attract adherents on both right and left. It is hardly an ignoble proposition, after all.

Yet it is also hardly an uncontested one. Scholarly debate over the proper relationship between the juridical and political realms, between law and politics, extends back at least to Plato and shows no sign of ending.² Establishing clear lines of demarcation between those realms is notoriously difficult; nearly all analysts acknowledge the inevitability of a substantial interface. But whether the interests of justice are best served by minimizing that interface or by admitting it in particular circumstances, or even by expanding it, is a question that continues to generate profound reflections on the meaning of law itself. The literature is so rich precisely because the issue is so multivalent—and so vexing.³ For even as we understand that elisions between these worlds are inevitable and sometimes even salubrious, we also recognize necessary disjunctions, clashes, and even outright antitheses between the fluid, contingent, opportunistic dynamics characterized as political and the fixed, routinized, and (hopefully) principled procedures conjured by the term law. How, when, and where should the boundaries be set? How stringently should they be maintained? The premise of this book is that the Aernoult-Rousset Affair can provide a vehicle for deeper reflection on this fundamentally philosophical question.

To be sure, parts of this story seem germane to more immediate, pragmatic considerations as well, especially for Americans. At this time, any inquiry touching on basic principles and operations of military justice, even those of a distant time and place, appears topical in light of our own, contemporary debates over the role of special military commissions and tribunals in adjudicating certain allegations of terrorism. Here, caution must be exercised. The contemporary American consideration of these questions revolves around very different axes than did the debate over military justice in belle époque France. For us, the most burning issue is how American military justice will treat non-nationals, including civilians and individuals of shadowy, crypto-military status; for the French, the issue was how military justice would treat French citizens, ever vigilant of legal equality and protective of hard-earned republican rights. It would be a mistake to exaggerate what the Aernoult-Rousset Affair can bring to our understanding of the most specific procedural and organizational questions confronting our own military jurisdiction. Yet lessons there definitely are—lessons of a more general order, on things of enduring importance for any and all special jurisdictions.

One of them, I submit, involves the perils of legalistic overreach, or a disdain by representatives of a particular jurisdiction for the political realm that is so deep as to become self-defeating in the end. Basically, the argument I wish to make here is that defenders of French military justice clung to an ideal of political insularity that, especially after the Dreyfus Affair, should have been reconsidered; and that the jurisdiction—and, more significantly, France—paid a real, albeit not immediately obvious, price for that intransigence. The system’s supporters succeeded in blocking nearly all of the many reform proposals put forward after the Dreyfus Affair by those committed to holding military justice more accountable to the society the army defended. But that reformist element could not be made simply to fade away. Rather, it turned from the parliamentary arena to the streets, and the result was the no-holds-barred public agitation that coalesced around Albert Aernoult and Émile Rousset. The opprobrium and reversals the Aernoult-Rousset Affair brought upon the military jurisdiction were the direct result of its own supporters’ stubborn resistance to even the modest, calibrated openings to the civilian juridical and political universe proposed earlier.

Yet it will also become clear by the end of this study that this analysis is not exactly incontestable. In fact, the ultimate meaning of the Aernoult-Rousset Affair cannot be captured in any simple, single political or juridical prescription. For there are surprises aplenty here, and the final outcome of the entire matter was anything but clear-cut. Its deepest lessons, I believe, must be determined by readers themselves. I hope they will follow the many twists and turns of this strange story just as contemporaries did—that is, experiencing the same sensation of assumptions undercut that partisans on both sides must have felt at various points along the way. By the conclusion, I know that readers will have formed their own ideas regarding whether—at least in these particular cases—the intrusion of politics in fact illuminated or occluded the truth, and whether it advanced or distorted justice.

For in the end, what the Aernoult-Rousset Affair demonstrates most effectively is that the nexus of law and politics was as maddeningly complex then and there as it is here and now.

ONE

L’Armée, c’est la Nation

Surveying the state of the French army and its relationship to the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, General Jules Bourelly did not like what he saw.¹

The army was an institution Bourelly had known and loved for a long time. Born into a military family in 1853, he was an estimable soldier-scholar who had fought in both the Italian campaign of 1859 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, and then written books about each.² His study of Abraham de Fabert, France’s first plebeian marshal, had been honored with the Thérouanne Prize by the Académie Française, and he had gone on to publish specialized works on subjects ranging from comparative military history to contemporary strategy and tactics (while rising to the rank of brigadier general in 1893).³ By 1902 he was one of the most prolific and respected commentators on military matters in France, with Le Correspondant de Paris his preferred vehicle for communicating with the general public.

So when General Bourelly devoted a lengthy article in that journal to the controversial proposition that "L’Armée, c’est la Nation, or the assertion of an intimate union that must or should reign between the army and the nation," his words carried real weight.⁴ Bourelly was convinced the idea was a pernicious one and he argued his case with passion and skill.

To Bourelly France’s civilian and military worlds were not only separate but almost ontologically distinct realms. La Nation was a political reality, its laws and institutions the arenas where particularistic groupings sought to advance specific, immediate, generally material interests. There was nothing inherently ignoble about that world; it was where human aspirations for material betterment, social status, and personal liberty found their necessary outlets. But L’Armée was something else, something higher and finer and all too often misunderstood by outsiders. To Bourelly the army was neither the grand fraternal lodge that some of its champions imagined nor the tribe of brutes excoriated by its critics. To be sure, it was the nation’s servant and would kill when the nation required it to kill. But those who knew the institution intimately understood that killing was only its secondary function—even though an acute consciousness of the inescapability of pain and death was integral to its primary one.

The army’s real raison d’être was the preservation of a certain moral state, a condition that could only exist among those for whom pain and death were omnipresent and viscerally appreciated realities. It was a kind of egoless asceticism that Bourelly, like many others, labeled the military spirit. The general was careful to distinguish that spirit from both "esprit de corps and esprit de guerrier.⁵ Civilians often reduced the military spirit to the camaraderie of the barracks, or to a sort of swaggering personal belligerence. Actually, the real thing was neither. Men genuinely imbued with the military spirit were men who had made a pact with honor, a hard and demanding pact. For honor was born of precisely those deprivations, fears, and torments that civilians made every effort to circumvent. In the army ordeals had to be confronted, and honor was the reward men earned by enduring them with a measure of grace. Those who did would never again prize the comforts and liberties of the civilian world quite so highly. Instead, they would prioritize personal courage, and a patriotism unsullied by material interests. Indeed, only men who had fully internalized the military spirit could rise above the pettiness of the civilian world, spurn its cacophony of contending factions and ideologies, and embrace an absolute devotion to the flag, which is the emblem, not of such or such form of government, but of the common fatherland, of France."⁶ They were French in a way that other Frenchmen could never really be.

Bourelly’s depiction of the army as a sort of monastery within which the follies and corruptions of the civilian world were kept at bay was hardly new. As early as 1855, General Gaston Gallifet and War Minister Eugène Lamy had described the military spirit in terms that might just as easily have denoted early Christian anchorites. To them, that spirit demanded the annihilation of all those rebellions which occur in man against the imperatives of suffering and sacrifice . . . the voluntary death of will, in which obedience alone survives.⁷ Nor was the idea that military life represented a superior moral model confined to military spokesmen. In the late 1880s the celebrated novelist Anatole France had declared that if there is anything that is sacred in human society, agreed upon by all, it is the army.⁸ A generation later attorney and journalist Gaetan Moisand could still portray the army as a necessary organization not because it defended France’s frontiers but because it served as a school of discipline and order, indeed, the only institution where personal honor was elevated to the level of a cult. In fact, Moisand argued that the point of military service was mainly the inculcation of that quality. He proposed that "military obligation has no goal other than giving each citizen a military education, and that education must be complete: moral as well as physical."⁹

But as General Bourelly considered that linkage between the world of soldiers and that of citizens, between monastery and secular society, he was troubled. Their mutual dependence was a simple truism. But sustaining a right and proper relationship with the nation was more difficult for the army now than it had been in, say, Gallifet’s and Lamy’s day. For by the turn of the twentieth century the nation was riddled by pathogens that had been barely visible in those men’s prime, invaded everywhere by the egoism, the immoderate love of well-being, contempt for authority, and class hatreds that characterized modernity. That’s why Bourelly would have no truck with the notion that either the army’s practices or the ethos that animated them should somehow be brought into closer proximity with those that prevailed outside the barracks. Only the ill-informed, Bourelly felt, ever described the army as the nation incarnate. Indeed, to him nothing could have been further from the truth. The army might not even survive an intimate union with the nation as it stood in 1902. On the contrary, The military spirit finds in the army the elements that suit its self-development; it is not communicated from the nation to the army; rather, it is weakened when the nation becomes the army, or even disappears entirely.¹⁰

Bourelly framed with admirable acuity a problem that a great many military men of his time—and not just in France—had pondered. How could the school of order, of morality, of discipline, of respect for authority that was the army serve a nation that was itself increasingly disorderly, divided, and licentious?¹¹ How could the army place its collective life and honor at the disposal of the nation, while inoculating itself from the toxins the nation now carried? In France the question was particularly complex because the French army was affixed to a state—since 1871, the democratic Third Republic—that, precisely for being more responsive to popular currents than Europe’s more authoritarian regimes, tended more than they did to gather, amplify, and transmit to the army all the diseases to which modern society had fallen prey.

To Bourelly one word denoted that penetration of civilian norms and priorities into military settings. Politics, in the deepest and broadest sense, was the enemy. It had always been the enemy. It was a problem that transcended both party and ideology. Those were carriers, not sources, of the sickness. All parties, all ideologies, all vehicles for the expression of political interests were dangerous in their own, varying ways.

Indeed, Bourelly’s antipathy to the politicization of military culture and organization was not at all reducible to reactionary or reflexively antidemocratic sentiment. Nor, for that matter, was Le Correspondant de Paris a reactionary publication (it was directed by Étienne Lamy, son of the former war minister and a Catholic who had chosen to heed the Vatican’s recent counsel to bridge the historic divide between the church and republican France). To be sure, Bourelly’s commentary in that journal identified the single most objectionable brand of politics as that practiced by democrats who refused to exempt the army from their campaign to render all state institutions fully transparent and accountable. Yet he was also perfectly aware that when authoritarians and conservatives had controlled the state, they too had been dismayingly willing to subordinate the special organizational needs of the army to alien, narrowly political imperatives.

In 1818, Bourelly noted disapprovingly, the restored Bourbon regime had ended universal military service simply out of a desire to secure political acceptance from an exhausted populace. The lottery system they had introduced, with its seven-year term of service for those selected, had seemed adequate when the state’s military commitments were minimal (e.g., during the invasion of Spain in 1823). But this prioritization of political exigencies would bear poisoned fruit later in the century, from which France would nearly perish. Fully aware that his own political fortunes were tied to the well-being of the middle classes, Napoleon III had not only retained the lottery system but had eased the way for bourgeois youth to buy their way out of military service. Using those payments to bestow extra pay and benefits on reenlisting veterans, he created an army of Old Soldiers—grizzled veterans to whom the emperor was prepared to entrust the fate of the nation. In fact, those Old Soldiers were a kind of glorified praetorian guard drawn from the lower social orders, hardly up to the brand of warfare the Prussian Landwehr would visit upon it in 1870.¹²

Indeed, General Bourelly was filled with admiration for the military acumen of the First Republic, which, after constituting itself in 1792, had inaugurated perhaps the most glorious era in French military history. The Third Republic likewise earned a nod of approval from Bourelly for its approach to military organization—at least at its inception. The general noted the willingness of the Third Republic’s founders to put politics aside, however grudgingly, and lay at least the foundations for an army worthy of the name. That had been no mean feat. It was one thing, amid the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, to recognize the need for military reorganization. Deciding on its terms was another matter entirely. Left-liberal republicans, impressed by Prussia’s military prowess, had urged emulation of her system of compulsory and universal conscription, noting that it had been inspired by France’s own "levée en masse under the First Republic. More conservative elements were ill-disposed, after the trauma of the Paris Commune, toward putting a gun on the shoulder of every socialist," as Thiers put it.¹³ They preferred a modified version of the old model, a more professionalized and better led volunteer or lottery-selected force. In the end, the principle of universal service was endorsed—partially, haltingly, but palpably.

In 1872 the new National Assembly agreed after extensive debate on a compromise measure mandating a five-year term of service, with a rather generous set of exemptions (priests, seminarians, and university students; sole supporters of extended families; the physically handicapped). Financial limitations, as well as conservatives’ political concerns, would prevent the state from actually holding the entire conscript class under arms for an entire five-year term. So a lottery system reduced the term of service to one year for a fortunate subset of conscripts; and the legal option of buyouts for a portion of whichever term the lottery had devolved remained open to all, and much used. The principle of obligatory