The French Army: From Obedience to Insurrection

What tempts an army to move into politics and ultimately to pass beyond the threshold of legality into the realm of civil disobedience and insurrection? In Latin America and the underdeveloped world, where such occurrences have been common, the phenomenon of military “praetorianism” poses relatively few analytical problems for the historian or social scientist. But the forces in modern democratic societies which lead an army into rebellion are far more complex, just as, fortunately, they arise with far less frequency. In contemporary France the problem of military insurrection is especially complicated, all the more so since the French army, until the era of the Second World War, had always regarded itself as “la grande muette,” suffering but obedient, and the French officer corps had prided itself on its apoliti-cism and devotion to strict professional duty.