Soldiers as Police: The French and Prussian Armies and the Policing of Popular Protest, 1889-1914 (review)

Professor Anja Johansen, in revising her Ph.D. dissertation into Soldiers As Police, has produced a well-researched, carefully thought-out, and detailed study of Prussian and French military intervention in public protest incidents during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century. Johansen, who now teaches at the University of Dundee, divides her book into eleven chapters which are grouped into three parts: Domestic Military Intervention in its Political Context; Popular Protest and Riot Policing; and Bureaucrats, Generals and Elites in Westphalia and Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In her twenty-nine page introduction, Johansen sets out the problem as she sees it: in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the French and Germans "developed opposite practices in terms of relying on the army for the policing of protest" (p. 1). While the Germans increasingly refrained from using regular army troops, the French were busy involving their army ever more frequently in protest policing.

As Johansen explains, the French Third Republic and the Prussian-dominated German Empire paradoxically used their armies against civilians in ways that might, on the face of it, surprise the casual inquirer. After all, the Third Republic was thought of at the time as a democratic and liberal regime while the Second Reich was a state heavily influenced by military values and one that generally maintained a considerable degree of authoritarianism in its government. We would expect, therefore, for the reverse to be true—the heavy hand of regular army troops in Germany while the French carefully abstained from using their army in protest policing.

By examining in depth the two areas in France and Germany where industrialization was most advanced and where public protest was endemic, the French departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the Prussian province of Westphalia, Johansen demonstrates why the apparent paradox is not a paradox at all. After 1889, but especially after 1897 when the Interior Ministry came on board, French authorities began to apply to the entire country the techniques of Paris Prefect of Police Louis Lépine (p. 86). Lépine's strategy was to prevent and contain violence by the use of overwhelming numbers of police and soldiers who were instructed to use force cautiously. Thus, although the Third Republic's army was used frequently to police public protest, the number of deadly incidents was rare since the police actually had more flexibility because they knew they would not be overwhelmed by the protesters. As a result of the lack of confidence between civilian and military authorities, the Germans, on the other hand, seldom used their army to police public protest but when they did, there were few guidelines as to where to place soldiers, how many to use, what instructions to give them, and who would pay the bill. Where the French had worked out all these details, the Germans basically used an ad hoc process resulting in confusion, frustration, and deep dissatisfaction.

The deep crevasse between civilian and military in Germany, what Johansen refers to as "compartmentalization" (pp. 199, 207, 250), made civilians afraid to use soldiers for fear they would exacerbate the situation, whereas military commanders disdained the use of their troops in civilian affairs for fear that it would distract soldiers from their primary duty of preparing to meet the enemy and that it might possibly undermine the loyalty of the conscript soldiers and reservists. The French, in effect, worked out standard operating procedures that came into effect during the numerous times the army was called out to police public disturbances. Although the Third Republic also feared the contamination of conscripts, the French had an even greater fear that public disturbances, unless controlled, might overthrow the entire regime.

Johansen has marshaled the evidence...