From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870-1914 (review)

The narrative of fin-de-siècle French history is usually marked by major events such as the Dreyfus Affair, the separation of Church and State, imperial rivalry with Great Britain, the increased labor conflict of the first decade of the twentieth century, and the nationalist revival that seems, almost inexorably, to lead into the events of the summer of 1914. Paul Miller has provided an important counterpoint to these events, by emphasizing the significance of antimilitarism in the early Third Republic and its relationship to other, better-known, developments.

Miller begins by describing the origins of antimilitarism in the first decades of the Third Republic. He argues that trade unions were influenced by antimilitarism even before the 1890s, discounting the idea that the Dreyfus Affair of that decade was the origin of Third Republican opposition to military service. He then turns to the development of the movement, showing that by 1906 it had developed leaders - notably Gustave Hervé - strategies and ideologies that positioned it to play a significant role in pre-World War i politics. The growing strength of the movement, as well as the military threat from Germany that increasingly influenced the leaders of the Third Republic in the decade before the war, led the government to a series of repressive actions between 1906 and 1911. But, as Miller shows, antimilitarism spread not through separate organizations like the independent Assocation Internationale Antimilitariste, but through syndicates and Bourses du Travail, where it was part of the response of French workers in different parts of the country to local conditions. On the eve of the war, the resulting antimilitarist movement was marked by divisions between socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists. The socialists worked on political terrain, presenting the movement's positions in the Chamber of Deputies and to the broader public. Anarchists, whose antipatriotism informed their resistance to military service and authority, worked outside the army. Syndicalists, in contrast, worked in the casernes and barracks of the army itself, urging soldiers to disobey orders. But, Miller says, "antimilitarism worked so well indeed because of its variegated parts" (171).

Miller shows the growth of this cooperation through an analysis of the Aernoult-Rousset affair of 1909–1912, a case that began with the death of Albert Aernoult, a soldier in a disciplinary company of the African battalions serving in Algeria. While the army attributed his death to a stroke brought on by a "violent rage," questions began to be raised when another soldier, Emile Rousset, claimed to have seen Aernoult beaten to death by officers of his battalion. The affair followed the path of such incidents in the French army, with Rousset being convicted of refusal to obey orders and insulting his superiors in 1910, and condemned to five years in prison. The antimilitarist movement was able to obtain his pardon in 1911. Even though a few months later Rousset was convicted of murdering another soldier, a massive demonstration on February 11, 1912 that brought 20,000 to Père-Lachaise Cemetery demonstrated that socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists could work together effectively. As Miller notes, however, while the Affair did mark exceptional cooperation between normally contentious allies, it did not provide the means to begin the permanent, revolutionary antimilitarist movement that Gustave Hervé and others envisaged. The movement therefore found it difficult to combat the increasing state repression that marked the period after 1911, and in the context of the Nationalist Revival of those years it increasingly found expression in a "moral" resistance to militarism and nationalism by the cgt and others. As Miller remarks, this moral resistance was very much in the revolutionary tradition. It indicates, however, the limited ability of dissident movements such as this one to affect mainstream politics in the Third Republic.

Miller's study allows us to understand the complexities of republican citizenship in modern France, bringing to light the activities and views of those who differed from the mainstream "radical...