Minotaur: French Military Justice and the Aernoult-Rousset Affair

ONE—“L’Armée, c’est la Nation”

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 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. “L’Armée, c’est la Nation” 11 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 12 M I N O T A U R...