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"France. Armée"
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Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée : motivation, military culture, and masculinity in the French army, 1800-1808
The men who fought in Napoleon's Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon's soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon's soldiers reasons to fight.
eBook
Guibert : father of Napoleon's Grande Armée
\"A scholarly examination of the life and career of Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, the foremost military theorist in France, between 1770 and his death in 1790.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The French Army and Its African Soldiers
As part of France's opposition to the independence of its former colonies in the years following World War II, its army remained deeply invested in preventing the decolonization of the territories comprising French West Africa (FWA). Even as late as the 1950s, the French Army clung to the hope that it was possible to retain FWA as a colony, believing that its relations with African soldiers could offer the perfect model for continued ties between France and its West African territories.InThe French Army and Its African SoldiersRuth Ginio examines the French Army's attempts to win the hearts and souls of the local population at a time of turbulence and uncertainty regarding future relations between the colonizer and colony. Through the prism of the army's relationship with its African soldiers, Ginio considers how the army's activities and political position during FWA's decolonization laid the foundation for France's continued active presence in some of these territories after independence. This project is the first thorough examination of the French Army's involvement in West Africa before independence and provides the essential historical background to understanding France's complex postcolonial military relations with its former territories in Africa.
eBook
Early Trench Tactics in the French Army
In the English-speaking world the First World War is all too often portrayed primarily as a conflict between Britain and Germany. The vast majority of books focus on the Anglo-German struggle, and ignore the dominant part played by the French, who for most of the war provided the bulk of the soldiers fighting against the central powers. As such, this important and timely book joins the small but growing collection of works offering an overdue assessment of the French contribution to the Great War. Drawing heavily on French primary sources the book has two main foci: it is both an in-depth battle narrative and analysis, as well as a work on the tactical evolution of the French army in Spring 1915 as it endeavored aggressively to come to grips with trench warfare. This period is of crucial importance as it was in these months that the French army learned the foundations of trench warfare on which their conduct for the remainder of the war would rest. The work argues that many advanced practices often considered German innovations - such as the rolling barrage, infiltration tactics, and the effective planning and integration of artillery bombardments - can all be traced back to French writing and action in early 1915. The work argues that - contrary to received opinion - French army bureaucracy proved effective at very quickly taking in, digesting and then disseminating lessons learned at the front and French commanders proved to be both effective and professional. Such radical conclusions demand a fundamental rethink of the way we view operations on the Western Front.
eBook
Conscripts and deserters : the army and French society during the Revolution and Empire
Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities.
eBook
First to fight : an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I
\"Five days after the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, American Kiffin Rockwell was on a ship headed for France. The United States would not join the war for nearly three years, but Rockwell believed it was time to fight. He joined the elite French Foreign Legion and was soon fighting in the trenches of the Western Front. A combat wound in 1915 rendered him unfit to fight on the ground, so Rockwell volunteered to fight in the air, becoming a charter member of the soon-to-be legendary Lafayette Escadrille, a fighter squadron of volunteer American pilots. In May 1916, Rockwell became the first pilot to score a victory for the new unit when he shot down a German plane. He was wounded in the skies over Verdun but refused hospitalization, insisting on remaining in the air. He flew more missions with the Lafayette Escadrille than any other pilot until his death in aerial combat in September 1916. First to Fight is a high-octane drama of a remarkable soldier and pilot who fought in the trenches and in the skies during World War I. It is the story of one of the first American fighter pilots at the dawn of aerial combat, the era of the Red Baron, with dogfighting biplanes high above the trench lines. But more than a World War I story, more than an aviation story, this is the story of an idealist who volunteered--long before his country drafted its first soldier--to fight, and ultimately die, in defense of civilization.\"-- Book jacket.
Book
Dying to Learn
In Dying to Learn
, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how
wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front,
which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with
deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French,
and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics,
combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war,
only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of
revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines
that in hindsight represented the best way to fight.
Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that
determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish
good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the
entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which
leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively
the organization retains control over soldier and officer training;
and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal
assessment mechanism.
Through careful study of the British, French, and German
experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn
provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis,
command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for
adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary
technological change.
eBook