Mutinies

If often overlooked by historians, the mutinies nonetheless deserve closer attention. They had their origin in the Allies’ intervention in the Russian Civil War, beginning in 1918. This intervention was a consequence of the threat posed to the victorious powers in World War I by both the Russian Revolution and the defeat of Germany, which still had large armed forces active in the East.

The first mutiny began on November 21, 1918, shortly after French armed forces first reached Russia, when soldiers of the 21^st Colonial Infantry stationed in Archangel refused to fight. This isolated rebellion had no apparent connection to other mutinies, but it anticipated three further waves of protest. The first phase of mutiny began at Tiraspol, in the Ukraine, between January 30 and February 8, 1919. It took place among the 58^th Infantry, which had been fighting against Bulgarian troops in Bessarabia. The mutiny culminated when 467 men refused to cross the river Dniester. The mutineers were taken to Bender, where they were kept imprisoned for three days and court-martialed for disobeying an order in the face of the enemy.

This first phase of mutiny occurred against the backdrop of a humiliating retreat for the Allied occupation forces. Mutinies affected the 176^th Infantry and a detachment of sailors of the battleship Justice at Kherson between March 4 and 9, when General Philippe d’Anselme decided to evacuate. The following day, d’Anselme telegraphed General Henri Berthelot with news that two French units that had arrived from Kherson the previous day had refused orders. A month later, on April 5, mutinies broke out at Odessa with the 7^th Engineers as well as the 19^th Artillery. Two days later, in the north, the 21^st Colonial Infantry regiment mutinied once more at Archangel.

With the second phase of contestation, the mutinies passed from the land to the fleet. On April 16, the officer mechanic André Marty’s clandestine organization and contact with Romanian Social Democrats were discovered aboard the destroyer Protet at Galaţi (Galatz), a port city on the Danube in eastern Romania. Three days later, the revolt began aboard the battleship France at anchor in Sevastopol harbor, quickly spreading to other battleships — the Jean Bart, the Justice, the Vergniaud, and the Mirabeau — and the smaller gunboats Algol and Escaut.

On the second day of protests — April 20, Easter Sunday — a notorious incident took place: the Morskaïa Road “ambush” or “massacre.” Greek troops under French command opened machine-gun fire on a demonstration of the local population and French mutineers in Sevastopol. Motivated by a desire for demobilization, a crucial grievance on the France was the order to perform coal loading duties on the Easter holiday. Under the pressure of the revolt, the commander agreed to the return home and the postponement of coal duties. These were performed without supervision of the officers on Tuesday, April 22, and the France set sail on the following day. The mutineers aboard the France believed that they had secured victory and that they had the commander’s word of honor. It was not until their arrest in the Tunisian port of Bizerte on May 1 that they realized the ephemeral nature of their victory.

As news of the Sevastopol rebellion spread, the mutinies recommenced elsewhere in the Black Sea. The battle cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau was in Odessa. On April 23, the crew learned that an officer accused of conspiracy from the Protet was on the ship. Two days later, sailors from the supply boat Suippe told of the events of Sevastopol. On April 26, Rear-Admiral Caubet hastily removed Marty from the ship, shortly before the first assemblies of men, who sang the Internationale and elected delegates. Playing for time, the admiral offered to do all he could for a swift return to France and that there would be no punishments. The outbreak of unrest took hold on the nearby torpedo boats Mameluk and Fauconneau. The battle cruiser sailed to Tendra, apparently en route to Istanbul. At Tendra, the mutiny spread to the battle cruiser Bruix. However, having bided his time, the admiral was able to arm his officers and restore order on the Waldeck-Rousseau and then threaten the mutineers of the Bruix. In the final episode in this sequence of revolts in the Black Sea, the torpedo boat Dehorter at Kerch mutinied between May 1 and 10.

A third, more expansive stage of revolt spread across the Mediterranean to France itself. It involved sailors, soldiers, and workers in port cities, where the desire for demobilization and military grievances mixed on the streets with the demands of labor. At Istanbul, on May 2, the battle cruiser Ernest Renan joined the movement, with three days of effervescence. On May 20, the 117^th Heavy Artillery disobeyed orders in Toulouse. On May 27, the 4^th and 37^th Colonial regiments did so in Bender, Bessarabia. The movement reached the capital of the French navy, Toulon, in the second week of June. The Toulon agitation took its most serious turn on June 10 aboard the battleship Provence, during which a group of two hundred sailors attempted to seize weapons and roughly handled officers. The Jean Bart, the Démocratie, the Courbet, the Diderot, the Lorraine, the Jules Ferry, and the Pothuau in the harbor were caught up in the mood of insubordination as were the naval depots, the 112^th Infantry and 143^th Colonial Infantry. Large street demonstrations occurred in Toulon on June 12 and 16.

Revolt at Home

By now, the Black Sea mutiny had become common knowledge in France — and it was debated in the Chamber of Deputies from June 12 to 17. Whereas left-wing deputies read letters from war-weary troops, the Navy Minister Leygues denounced the mutiny as a German plot, a criminal intrigue, a product of revolutionary propaganda designed to undermine victory — in short, an act of madness. But as knowledge of the mutinies spread in public as well as among the armed forces, the agitation moved from port to port — and from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. On June 14–15, sailors stationed in Rochefort protested, and two days later, the movement spread to sailors and soldiers in Brest, leading to violent clashes with police on horseback sent from Nantes. On June 19, Lorient witnessed demonstrations as did Cherbourg on June 24.

During this final phase of military protest in France, the mutinies also returned to the warships on the North African coast, the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Baltic. On June 13, noisy protests began during the inspection of plates aboard the battleship Condorcet, which had arrived at Tendra, near Odessa. Further refusals of orders were followed by the election of sailors’ delegates to present demands. In Bizerte, the agitation on the battleship Voltaire began on June 16, when the Commander Captain Stabenrath received two anonymous letters from the crew demanding demobilization and leave, both referring to the Black Sea mutiny. Indicative of how protest circulated, men joining the crew from Toulon communicated the news of events in the Black Sea.

The mutiny proper broke out on June 19 after Rear-Admiral de Margerie inspected the crew and announced that the ship was to leave for the Eastern Mediterranean. As the rear admiral went ashore, fifty men leaned over the railings and shouted, “Demobilization! Leave! To Toulon!” After the evening meal, a large assembly of men began a protest on the deck of the ship. The following morning, instructions conveyed by graffiti convened another meeting at 7:30 AM, which elected delegates (Georges Wallet, Henri Alquier, Pierre Vottero, Le Bras). They met with the commander, who promised to look into their demands, thereby calming the situation. Another mutinous assembly gathered on the evening of June 20. The commander waited three days to restore order through a wave of arrests.

A pattern of insubordination was now spreading to all compass points with a similar pattern of grievances, arguments, and tactics. The movement was bound together by demands for demobilization or leave, knowledge of the Black Sea mutiny, unofficial gatherings, protests during inspections or refusals to cooperate with orders, and arguments about the constitutional nature of the intervention. Unrest reached the French patrol boats in the Baltic Sea between June 21 and 23, and on June 26, sailors aboard the cruiser Guichen seized the ship in the Greek port of Itea, only to have it recaptured via the rapid deployment of Senegalese riflemen. On August 1, in Tendra, all but one of the crew of the torpedo boat Touareg signed a protest letter after news that their service was to continue. Two days later, the crew refused to be inspected, but the arrest of their leader and intimidation persuaded them to return to normal duties. On the Soviet state’s far eastern shore, the cruiser D’Estrées was also the scene of crew protests on August 13 and 14, in Vladivostok. On this occasion, their demands for demobilization led to the repatriation of reservists.

The very last act of mutiny took place aboard the battleship Diderot on October 5, ending the final generalized phase of military protest that had begun back in June. By this time, peace with Germany had been signed, demobilization continued to relieve the crisis, and the coming elections slated for November offered the prospect of change in the political situation. If the mutinies of the infantry are included, the wave of military protest lasted nearly a year, beginning in November 1918 and finally petering out only in October 1919. Its extensive geography ranged from Archangel and Vladivostok, via the Baltic to the Atlantic ports of metropolitan France, across the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Hundreds of mutineers faced courts-martial. This was very much more than “two days of madness” or “two bad days” as Navy Minister Georges Leygues described it in the Chamber of Deputies.

A Revolutionary Moment

Behind the scenes, the authorities knew 1919 was an exceptional year of social contestation. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau had access to the French military intelligence (“deuxième bureau“) situation reports on the mood in France. While much of small-town and rural France was “calm” or in “good spirits,” the deuxième bureau also relayed troubling news of anxiety, nervousness, and agitation elsewhere. The cost of living, the eight-hour day, demobilization, the Russian and Hungarian revolutions, and the state of the labor market all perturbed the mood around the time of the mutinies. Social tensions intensified among the trade unions and emergent veterans’ groups. The balm of victory was not able to soothe social hostility targeted toward women, foreigners, “shirkers,” and those who had profited from the war.

The mutineers constituted, in miniature, a chaotic conjuncture of profound global unrest. They were typical in the sense that they were forged by the great structural dynamics then at play. Ever since the moment that news of the mutiny prompted debate in the Chamber of Deputies and commentary in the press, a dispute about scale has plagued the mutiny. Participation in this movement was uneven.

This is partly because the mutinies’ scope and meaning were ambiguous. The movement could be read as both the feat of a “handful of leaders” and a mood that ran through much of the armed forces awaiting demobilization. The Black Sea mutiny became a synecdoche for a geographically and temporally expanded cycle of protest that lasted roughly eight months. Counting the number of participants is equally problematic: several hundred mutineers faced courts-martial, thousands participated in the protest, and more still were probably caught up in the atmosphere though they did not participate directly. Indeed, the events profoundly influenced even outside observers, like César Fauxbras who wrote a novel Mer Noire (1932) about the mutiny, or those who joined the campaign to amnesty imprisoned mutineers.

Dozens of mutineers joined the PCF, including André Marty and future minister and Resistance leader Charles Tillon, both of whom eventually broke from the party. The mutineers remained a presence in the party until the 1970s, by which time the generation of 1968 evoked and celebrated their memory. The dismissive trope that the revolt was two “bad” or “mad” days conducted by a “handful of traitors” only emerged because the mutiny did not fit with the official French state narrative of victory in war.

World history seems to have written 1919 as the year of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference. However, the actions of these politicians are better understood if the unruly context of 1919 is properly appreciated. Given that it marked the high watermark of global contention — of which the French mutinies were one manifestation — 1919 should not be reduced to Versailles alone.

Equally, an approach to the history of the French left focused on institutions alone might miss 1919’s importance in terms of the contentious ecology of the PCF’s emergence. Such formalism fails to explain fully the decisions at Tours. Nor can it grasp that militants’ powerful affinities with the Russian Revolution were rooted in experiences within France’s own armed forces, as well as the iconography of French heroes and martyrs symbolized by Jeanne Labourbe: the communist Eve and the mutinous Adam.