Mutinous Memories

This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies that struck the French infantry and navy in 1919. The revolt spread from France’s intervention against the Soviet Union across the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, finally resulting in unrest in French naval ports. Mutineers faced courts martial, years of hard labour and the threat of the death penalty.

Based on official records and the testimony of dozens of participants, this is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers. It examines their words for the traces of sensory perceptions, emotions and thought processes, revealing that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as the result of simple war-weariness and low morale is inadequate. In fact, an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. Taking this into account, the book considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.

Mutinous memories will interest students and scholars of both the Great War and its contentious aftermath. Setting the mutiny in a transnational context, it contributes to the growing perception of 1919 as the twentieth century’s most turbulent year.