Introduction
In the past two decades, historians and critics have shown how useful the history of emotions can be in writing social and cultural history.Footnote 1 However, most historians have been wary of using elements of modern neuroscience to inform their histories of emotions. This is both because the kinds of histories they write would not benefit from it and because neuroscience's naturalist and reductionist orientation seems inimical to the historical method. The model that currently dominates the field treats emotions as discursive artefacts, not as psychological or neurological facts. For instance, Barbara Rosenwein argues that the history of emotions should investigate how ‘systems of feeling’, consisting of ‘emotional styles, emotional communities, emotional outlets, and emotional restraints’, serve to ‘manage social life’.Footnote 2 Neuroscience has no role here, as it cannot tell us anything about how feeling obtains meaning.
Rosenwein does not deny that at least some categories of emotional experience are ‘hard-wired’ and alinguistic.Footnote 3 But she argues that it is best to avoid overemphasising or focusing on the wires of neuroscience because historians who do so may assume fallaciously that ‘hard-wired’ emotions come with ‘hard-wired’ behavioural responses and meanings. In other words, Rosenwein's critique is methodological, not epistemological; she does not condemn neuroscience's conclusions so much as question whether they are useful for historians. In this article, I argue that current research in neuroscience can, indeed, be useful in helping historians think through some questions, specifically those concerning the role of emotions in social protests.Footnote 4 The basic emotions of fear and anger shape and give meaning to many kinds of social protests. An understanding of the underlying biology of these emotions could deepen our understanding of how, why and when culture and context perform work on and upon neurological substrates, imbuing similar basic emotional experiences with different meanings.
There are two schools in the field of the neuroscience of emotions, the ‘constructivist’ and the ‘categorical’, the latter of which is sometimes referred to as ‘basic’ or ‘discrete’ emotions theory.Footnote 5 Constructivists argue that the neural correlates of emotion are networked and distributed across several different brain areas, including those involved with language and memory. It follows that emotional experiences are necessarily embedded in – and to some extent determined by – language, experience and expectations, and so cannot be understood outside their immediate social and cultural context.Footnote 6 Basic emotions theorists argue that some emotional experiences have discrete and dedicated neural correlates in the subcortex.Footnote 7 Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls these correlates ‘affective programmes’, arguing that all people have the same set of programmes because they share the same neural architecture.Footnote 8 Basic emotions are largely alinguistic and cross-cultural; two people should experience the same basic emotion in the same way. Categorical theorists disagree about which emotions should be considered basic, but this should not distract from their unanimous agreement that fear and anger are.Footnote 9
Historians have generally been hostile to the categorical theory. Because it cannot explain how people remember, reflect upon, and represent emotional experiences, there is no place for the categorical theory in the type of history described by Rosenwein. Indeed, those historians and critics who do look to neuroscience typically employ the constructivist model.Footnote 10 If the categorical theory of emotions were to have any use in historical thinking, it would be in answering different questions from those of Rosenwein. It would also confront difficult methodological problems relating to agency and the complexity of experience. It is not clear what a ‘historical’ interpretation based on the categorical theory might look like, and it is worth questioning whether historians should care about basic emotions at all.
Historians should care about the categorical theory because it is supported by decades of neurophysiological and clinical research. Indeed, most neuroscientists favour some version of the categorical theory over the constructivist theory because the evidence much more closely supports the former.Footnote 11 The strongest support for affective programmes and basic emotions comes from cross-species studies of homologous neural structures in the mammalian brain.Footnote 12 Evidence from neuro-imaging studies also strongly suggests that fear and anger have dedicated subcortical affective programmes, but is inconclusive as far as other basic emotions are concerned.Footnote 13 Moreover, the neurotransmitters involved in the affective programmes of fear and anger have been identified and characterised.Footnote 14 Historians of emotions should not ignore the impressive amount of evidence in support of what the categorical theory has to say about these two emotions.
Furthermore, I think it possible to use the categorical theory while avoiding reductionism and essentialism, so long as the historian uses it responsibly and with critical sensitivity to context. Any historical interpretation that employs basic emotions theory ought to have three defining characteristics. First, it would restrict itself to investigating how a specific basic emotion shaped and guided the actions of a small number of people over a short period of time. Second, it would require enough evidence to permit the historian to infer reasonably that this basic emotion was experienced. Eyewitness accounts and personal recollections could provide this evidence if read with an awareness of observer bias and potential misinterpretation. Finally, it would avoid treating basic emotions as phenomena experienced outside historical context. The basic affective experience of anger may be relatively consistent from person to person, but the social experience of this affective experience is not. In short, this type of history would be modest in scope, measured in its claims, and disciplined in its use of neuroscience.
In this article, I hope to show how this approach might look. I provide a case study of the mutiny of the French 82nd brigade d’infanterie (henceforth the 82nd BI), which took place on 1–2 June 1917. I argue that the canonical explanation of the mutinies – that they were caused by a combination of combat fatigue and disillusionment after the collapse of the Nivelle Offensive and the losses sustained during the Second Battle of the Aisne – fails to explain completely this specific mutiny.Footnote 15 The mutiny's most important, proximal, and sufficient cause was a shared emotional experience among mutineers brought about by alcohol consumption. The neurophysiological effects of alcohol consumption inhibited the affective programme of fear and stimulated that of anger. This chemically effected emotional shift combined with soldiers’ expectations and normative assumptions about what behaviours came with drinking. The social context and its affective predicate helped the soldiers overcome feelings of fear and tension that made it hard to disobey orders.Footnote 16 Thinking about the mutiny this way can help in explaining not only its outbreak, but also its course and conclusion.
The mutiny
At 1 p.m. on 1 June 1917, men from the 82nd BI (composed of the 23rd and 133rd régiments d’infanterie) received unwelcome news. At midnight, they would move out of their camp in the Tardenois region of eastern France and depart for the front. After the order went out, about 100 men from the 23rd RI came together in a group outside their billets and protested against the order. Soon, they were joined by several dozen men from the 133rd RI. The men complained their leave had been cut short. They marched in a column and shouted ‘Down with the war! We have had enough of the war!’Footnote 17 The commander of the 23rd RI, Lieutenant Colonel Brindel, rushed to the scene with another officer. He refused to listen to the demands of his men, one of whom – later identified as Antoine Hartmann – waved a makeshift red flag in Brindel's face. Brindel confronted Hartmann, roughed him up, tore the red banner out of his hands, and trampled it into the dirt. None of the men acted to protect Hartmann or threated Brindel. He ordered them to return to their camp, and they complied without protest, apparently cowed. Brindel assumed the protest was over and left.Footnote 18
Shortly after Brindel departed, the protestors reformed in a group. At 2.30 p.m., 100 men – again led by Hartmann – marched towards Ville-en-Tardenois, the village in which the brigade was headquartered. As they marched, the men shouted the same anti-war slogans.Footnote 19 The two highest ranking officers in the region – General Bulot, commander of the 82nd BI, and General Mignot, commander of the 41st DI – came to head off the men. Upon encountering their generals, the men in the column fell silent. The two commanders walked through an easily parted sea of horizon blue and arrested Hartmann for insubordination. Again, none of Hartmann's confederates came to his aid, and Hartmann himself did not resist. Bulot ordered the troops back to their billets. They complied without protest, and Bulot felt so confident of his authority that he marched at their head, as though leading a parade. Mignot described the men as showing ‘very reasonable expressions’, and neither he nor Bulot reported feeling threatened at any time.Footnote 20
These protests shared four characteristics. First, soldiers articulated the same demands and sentiments: a desire for rest and leave, unwillingness to return to the trenches, and disillusionment with their commanders following the collapse of the Nivelle Offensive and its failure to effect a break-through.Footnote 21 Second, the same men protested, both times with Hartmann at their head. Third, the protests were abortive, short, and failed in their stated goals. The will to disobey was quick to collapse. Fourth, while the protests were vocal, they were non-violent, and the protestors were deferential to their officers. At 1 p.m., two officers broke up a protest involving more than 100 men in a matter of minutes. At 2.30 p.m., two different officers broke up a larger protest in a similarly short period of time. In both cases, the protestors outnumbered their officers and could have easily resisted orders. But they did not, which suggests that however strongly the protestors may have felt, their feelings were not strong enough to overcome their hesitation and fear of command authority.
The men made another attempt at 6.30 p.m., when they left camp, formed a column, and marched on Ville-en-Tardenois. Again, the men carried red revolutionary flags and cried out anti-war slogans. Again, Bulot intercepted the men at the entrance to the town, confronted them, and ordered that they return to camp. But this protest differed from its predecessors in two respects. First, it was much larger. Bulot estimated its size at between 600 and 800 soldiers. Second, and more importantly, the protestors refused flatly to obey Bulot's orders to disperse.Footnote 22
Bulot was dumbfounded. He commanded, then asked, and then begged his men to return to their camp, but they pressed forward towards the centre of Ville-en-Tardenois. He reminded them of the 82nd BI's bravery and tenacity in battle. He appealed to their patriotism, evoking the ‘necessity of holding on in order to punish that nation of murderers [and] prevent [the French] from becoming slaves of the Boches’, but ‘the overheated minds of [the] over-excited men’ were impervious to his arguments.Footnote 23 The men surged around him and pushed him backwards. At about 7.45 p.m., Bulot climbed the front steps of Ville-en-Tardenois's town hall. He looked out upon about 2000 soldiers, nearly half the brigade, recalling bitterly that he ‘had before me the complete spectacle of a vituperative, unchained mob’.Footnote 24
It soon got much worse. Someone in the crowd threw a piece of wood at Bulot. It is impossible to know whether the soldier who threw it had bad intentions, but more pieces of wood followed the first, and stones followed the wood. As they pelted Bulot, the men changed their cries, shouting ‘Murderer! Blood drinker!’Footnote 25 Mignot arrived just after the protest turned violent and reported that ‘General Bulot. . . seemed to be the specific target. It appeared that the situation would turn tragic any minute, and we were afraid that the General, squeezed in and shoved around, could have found himself about in rather a tight spot’.Footnote 26 Fearing for Bulot's life, Mignot commanded Brindel to go to Bulot's aid. Along with some subaltern officers, Brindel pushed through the crowd and shielded Bulot from the abuse.Footnote 27
Bulot retreated with these officers into the hall, where they locked the door and built makeshift barricades. Outside, Mignot attempted to calm the crowd, which he described as ‘stubborn men, [numbering] about seven or eight hundred’.Footnote 28 The men demanded that Mignot rescind the order to enter the trenches and provide them with leave. This confrontation lasted until 9.00 p.m., when Mignot promised to consider the requests if the men ended their protest and went back to camp. Although Mignot apparently acceded to their requests, the men did not disperse. A group of them physically restrained Mignot, hoping to hold him hostage. He resisted and, battered by fists and rocks, struggled free. He retreated into the hall, where he joined Bulot and the rest of the field grade officers.Footnote 29
The men outside continued to agitate for several hours. Bulot reported that ‘the din in front of the town-hall continued to be rather intense until 10.30 p.m.’.Footnote 30 Mignot was more specific, stating that the ‘din’ was the sound of men calling for Bulot's head.Footnote 31 At 10.30 p.m., a group of protestors tried to break down the door, enter the hall, drag Bulot out into the street, and murder him. A few got into the building and engaged their officers in a short, violent confrontation in the doorway. The soldiers were beaten back into the street.Footnote 32 Between 10.30 p.m. and 2.30 a.m. the following morning, between fifty and eighty men continued to assault the hall with pieces of wood and ‘very big stones’, smashing all its windows, destroying its façade, and calling ceaselessly for Bulot's head.Footnote 33
The remainder of the men went one of two ways. The majority wandered through Ville-en-Tardenois, tearing up the streets, smashing windows, overturning ammunition and baggage trains, and terrorising residents. A report from mid June described them as the ‘absolute masters of the street’.Footnote 34 A smaller group abandoned the town and set off towards the neighbouring village of Romigny, where the 120th RI and 128th RI were camped. This group caused a ruckus before it was driven away by rifle fire.Footnote 35 Mignot reported that all the mutineers returned to their camps and fell asleep by about 3.30am. The streets, so recently full of violence, were suddenly empty. Mignot ordered Bulot away, with the suggestion that Bulot never show his face in front of his men again.Footnote 36 Bulot took the advice.
The following morning, most soldiers acted as if nothing had happened the night before. Company commander Libaud's men arrived promptly for morning exercises, showing ‘the most perfect calm, excellent manoeuvres’. He concluded that ‘[the company had regained] its normal appearance’ and at 12.00 p.m. was confident enough to read out a new set of orders specifying that the 82nd BI would be moving to an undisclosed location. His men received the news without protest, and he concluded that they wanted to ‘do the right thing’ and follow orders.Footnote 37 Mignot too reported that 2 June was quiet. He watched the men during exercises, noting they seemed ‘satisfied with the provisory solution offered, a few days of extra rest in the rear, with transport to begin the day after tomorrow’.Footnote 38 Mignot did not mention that his ‘provisory solution’ was disingenuous. Early in the morning the following day, the men were sent to the rear, but not for rest. The entire brigade was placed under quarantine. Over the next week, French army intelligence conducted a thorough investigation into the causes and leaders of the mutiny.
On 2–3 June, the men were transported by train to the divisional depot in Bassu, about thirty kilometres south-east of Châlons-en-Champagne. The investigation began late the following day and continued for about a week. During this time, the soldiers displayed different reactions to the events of 1 June and the investigation. Some professed regret and co-operated. According to one officer, most men ‘reasoned very coolly, and many admitted that they had “gone a little too far”’.Footnote 39 This report conflicted with another, which suggests that a substantial group of men were unrepentant and unco-operative. An officer named Le Verger reported that, on the evening of 4 June, a group of about 150 men boldly began another violent demonstration, right in the centre of divisional depot and in full view of their commanders and the gendarmes guarding Bassu. During the demonstration, one soldier attacked his captain, injuring him badly.Footnote 40
The 82nd BI was punished more harshly than any other mutinous unit. On 5 June, investigators arrested ninety-four men from the 23rd RI and seventy from the 133rd RI for their indiscipline on the night of 1–2 June. They brought charges against sixty-nine more men for the indiscipline of 4–5 June, making a total of 233 arrests. Courts martial convicted twenty-eight soldiers of serious crimes.Footnote 41 Gustave Hatron, Aimé Aubry, Georges Fraissé, Antoine Hartmann, and Charles Jeannot were sentenced to death. Aubry, Fraissé, and Hartmann were executed on 19 June, and Hatron on 27 June.Footnote 42 Jeannot's sentence was commuted to life in prison.Footnote 43 Each of the field officers of the brigade lost his command.Footnote 44 In a way, the mutineers succeeded. They got their time in the rear, and the brigade never entered the trenches again, as it was dissolved at the end of June. Its soldiers were integrated into other units, where they very likely continued to fight along the Chemin des Dames until October, when Pétain finally ended offensive operations.
The question of motive and the role of alcohol
Bulot was deeply surprised that his men had mutinied. He confessed in an official report that he found the mutiny ‘incomprehensible, because during the thirty-three months it was under my orders, the brigade had always done its duty’. He likened the outbreak of mutiny to ‘a sudden thunderbolt’.Footnote 45 At first blush, it is surprising that Bulot was surprised. According to the statistics provided by Denis Rolland in La Grève des tranchées, there had been sixty-three large acts of indiscipline in French units in the Aisne region between 4 April and 1 June. Major mutinies took place only a few kilometres from the 82nd BI's camp, including 162nd RI's at Coulonges (20–25 May) and 18th RI at Villers-sur-Fère (27 May).Footnote 46 The 128th RI, whose 20 May mutiny was the first in which soldiers directly demanded rest and leave of their commanders, was stationed in Romigny, a little over two kilometres from Ville-en-Tardenois, while the army investigated its mutiny during late May.Footnote 47 The 82nd BI was literally surrounded by other units that had recently mutinied. The indiscipline may have been like a thunderbolt, but the clouds above Bulot's head had been very dark and stormy for several days.
In an incisive report from 19 June, an investigator named ‘Capitaine H.B’ outlined what he saw as the main antecedents to the widespread indiscipline along the Aisne. Three factors he identified – lack of rest, backlog in leave, and the ‘collapse of the hopes of April’ – apply directly to the 82nd BI. Between 16 April and 1 June, the men spent two weeks in the front lines. What rest they took was restive, immediately behind the combat zone. Because they were actively engaged in operations, their leave was cut short or delayed. As far as disappointment goes, ‘H.B.’ observed that ‘rarely has an army been in such a state of enthusiasm and confidence comparable to ours before the April offensive’, but the higher the confidence, the more devastating the collapse of morale that follows failure.Footnote 48 The men of the 82nd BI had high hopes before the offensive, and the brigade spent more time fighting and suffered heavier losses than any other French brigade during the first month of fighting in the eastern corner of the Aisne front. It had very good reason to be tired and disappointed. The general antecedents to indiscipline were particularly strong for the 82nd BI.
On the other hand, Bulot's surprise was justified for four reasons: the 82nd BI had no history of indiscipline, let alone violent collective indiscipline; its men had high morale on the evening of 31 May and the morning of 1 June; it was led by competent and experienced officers; and, as we have already seen, the protests at 1 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. were non-violent and easily dispersed.
Until 1 June, the 82nd BI had been a model unit that played a prominent role in the Second Aisne. On 16 April, it attacked German positions near the village of Loivre, where it met stiff resistance and dug in. It rotated out on 24–5 April. During its eight days in the trenches, the brigade lost 1,646 soldiers, about 35% of its strength. Despite these losses and the brigade's failure to take its objectives, an official report proclaimed the attack a ‘great success’.Footnote 49 The 82nd BI soon received replacement soldiers who brought it close to its original strength and, on 4 May, returned to the very trenches from which it was evacuated on 24–5 April. It suffered through another week of shelling and was pulled out of the lines on 11–12 May, when it moved into camps around Ville-en-Tardenois.Footnote 50 On 18 May, both regiments received the fourragère verte, a group-level distinction for valour in combat. Several officers received the légion d’honneur.Footnote 51 There is no evidence of indiscipline in the 82nd BI, individual or collective, at any time between 16 April and 1 June. The brigade experienced the worst of the Second Aisne and remained so dependable that it was recognised with awards.
Second, there is strong evidence that morale in the 82nd BI was high immediately before 1 June. On the evening of 31 May, Colonels Sabaterie and Brossier, army intelligence officers charged with evaluating the morale of units in the Tardenois region, visited the 82nd BI's camp. They reported that in the 133rd RI, ‘morale appeared to be satisfactory. [The men] expected to enter the trenches tomorrow or the day after’. One soldier full of esprit de corps even boasted that ‘when a regiment [is needed for] an attack, we are always the best’.Footnote 52 The colonels interviewed approximately fifty more soldiers from the 133rd RI, all of whom expressed similar attitudes. After an entire night evaluating the 133rd RI, Sabaterie and Brossier spent the morning interviewing men from the 23rd RI. They saw ‘nothing out of the ordinary’, and, satisfied the brigade would enter the trenches as ordered, left mid morning to vet another unit.Footnote 53 These two officers, who were trained specifically to identify signs of potential indiscipline, spent approximately twelve hours with, and interviewed more than, a hundred men from the brigade and found no problems worth reporting. Granted, Sabaterie and Brossier might have been incompetent inspectors who failed to ask the right questions. But there is no evidence of this, and barring indications to the contrary, it makes sense to accept their assertion that the men from the 82nd BI demonstrated sufficiently high morale the very day before and morning of the mutiny.
Third, pre- and post-mutiny reports indicate that the brigade was run by competent, respected, and generally well-liked commanders. Sabaterie and Brossier quoted a soldier from the 133rd RI as describing his commander, Baudrand, as a ‘good old chap, always the first to attack, and always at the head of his regiment’. Another fifty soldiers from the regiment gave similar testimony.Footnote 54 After the mutiny, a soldier from the 23rd RI stated that ‘all the subalterns are pretty much excellent. The Colonel [Brindel] is like a grandfather [and] Mignot isn't a bad sort’.Footnote 55 Mignot's evaluations of his subordinates were also positive. The subalterns were ‘courageous in combat [and. . .] models of discipline’; Brindel, ‘a supremely calm officer, balanced, just, and firm, whose command was appreciated at all levels’; Baudrand, a veteran of ‘proven bravery’; and Bulot, an ‘ardent leader, with great energy’ who led attacks, lived with his men in the trenches, and knew each of his soldiers personally.Footnote 56 Some of Mignot's praise may reflect his biases and desire to protect the brigade's reputation. But, in the days immediately preceding and following the mutiny, soldiers who had no reason to protect anyone's reputation praised the commanders, which suggests that Mignot's evaluations were not entirely disingenuous. The only commander the soldiers singled out for criticism was Bulot, whom some men considered over-eager to fight.Footnote 57
Finally, at 1 p.m. and 2.30 p.m., the protestors were deferential, uncommitted, and easily scattered. The antecedent factors that brought about these two earlier protests were no more pressing at 6.30 p.m.. Indeed, nothing substantive about 82nd BI's situation changed between 2.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m.. With all this in mind, Bulot's belief that he could convince the crowd he confronted at 6.30 p.m. to return to camp seems more reasonable. He was very wrong because something intervened in and shifted the emotional tenor of this last confrontation. As we have seen, commanders reported that, at 6.30 p.m., the protestors displayed the facial expressions and body language associated with anger. Formerly tentative men acted aggressively. They were hard to intimidate and had little respect for command authority. They showed a deeper commitment to protest and defied orders openly. Some were verbally and physically aggressive. Their stated goals changed; they wanted rest and Bulot's blood. A small group even tried to decapitate their commander.
The commanders’ reports provide evidence as to what may have underwritten this shift. After Bulot broke up the protest at 2.30 p.m., some of the protestors retreated to cafés and raided wine caches in their camps. According to officers’ reports, these men became very intoxicated, and it was these men who formed the ‘hard-core’ of mutineers, led the march at 6.30 p.m., invested the town hall, and tried to murder Bulot. For example, Mignot stated in one report that the men became ‘particularly drunk’ during dinner. After ‘getting themselves really worked up’, they marched on Ville-en-Tardenois and descended on their officers like ‘drunken apaches’.Footnote 58 In another report, he claimed to have seen several of the mutiny's ‘leaders’ drinking together at a café just moments before the third protest and identified the men who attacked him and Bulot as those whom he saw drinking to excess.Footnote 59 The mutiny ended, Mignot wrote, when there was no more alcohol and the ‘last drunkard disappeared’ from the streets.Footnote 60
Mignot's language was condescending, and his vision surely reflected in the distorting mirror of class and rank.Footnote 61 It would be problematic if his reports were the only ones claiming the protestors were intoxicated, but several others corroborate his observations. Sabaterie and Brossier determined the protesting men were ‘drunkards’.Footnote 62 Libaud described them as a ‘drunken band’.Footnote 63 Reporting on the indiscipline of 4 June, Le Verger, wrote that the men who attacked their officer were very intoxicated. One even explained the mutineers' demands in these terms: ‘No more exercises! No more postings! We don't want to do anything and we want to drink to our heart's content!’Footnote 64 Fayolle, the army corps commander, debriefed the entire command staff, reviewed all the reports, and signed off on the court martial charges. He too concluded that the mutineers were ‘under the influence of drink’.Footnote 65
This is important because alcohol has predictable effects on the affective programmes of fear and anger.Footnote 66 It inhibits the experience of fear by changing the levels of the neurotransmitters that govern fear's affective programme.Footnote 67 Similarly, it stimulates the experience of anger by changing the levels of the neurotransmitters that govern its affective programme.Footnote 68 Intoxication generates empirically verifiable feelings of anger among people who are typically calm, even when these people do not report the subjective experience of anger.Footnote 69 The relationship between the level of intoxication and increase in aggression is linear – drink more, feel less fear and more anger.Footnote 70 This inhibition of fear and stimulation of anger is a matter of neurochemistry, and it follows that, whatever a protestor felt at 1 p.m. or 2.30 p.m., he would have – ceteris paribus – felt less fear and more anger at 6.30 p.m. Footnote 71
Furthermore, alcohol affects the functioning of the prefrontal cortex in ways that complement and magnify its effects on subcortical affective programmes. The cluster of cognitive and behavioural patterns that results from alcohol-induced neuromodulation in the prefrontal cortex is called ‘alcohol myopia’. Intoxicated people are much more likely to ignore or misinterpret conflict mitigating cues, interpret neutral cues as hostile, and exaggerate hostile cues. They show inability to gauge risks and estimate the consequences of their behaviours. Finally, they display ‘empty goal commitment’, a tendency to strive for practically unreachable goals.Footnote 72 The reports of the officers describe the mutineers as alcoholic myopes: the men interpreted the presence of their commanders as a hostile cue, ignored repeated warnings about the consequences of their actions, and unrealistically thought their protest would result in rest and leave.
Finally, by drinking together, the men engaged a set of social norms and expectations about how intoxicated soldiers should act that further encouraged aggressive behaviour. The rituals of alcohol consumption were an integral part of the social world of the French trenches.Footnote 73 Men received a daily wine and spirits ration, which was intended specifically to boost morale, heighten aggressive behaviour, and generate feelings of group solidarity. Soldiers wrote in journals (both personal and trench), memoirs, and novels that wine drinking and the rituals associated with it filled them with righteous rage towards the Germans, eliminated their fear, depression, and anxiety, and provided them solace during times of suffering.Footnote 74 French soldiers expected that intoxication – their ‘bouclier alcoolique’Footnote 75 – would make them fearless and aggressive. The mutineers of the 82nd BI acted out this script, turning its effects on their own commanders.
With this in mind, we can revisit the timeline of the mutiny. Its suddenness could be the product of the change in the emotional state of soldiers resulting from intoxication. The men targeted Bulot not only because they disliked him, but also because their intoxication made this dislike more salient and rendered his very presence more threatening. Also, recall that Mignot reported that the mutiny ended when the last ‘drunkard’ wandered off. The nine hours between the mutiny's beginning at 6.30 p.m. and its end at 3.30 a.m. provided precisely enough time for men to become sober. It may be that, on 2 June, men did not display the anger of the night before because the alcohol that underwrote this anger was metabolised away. Finally, while intoxication may have encouraged physical aggression, it also would have made the mutineers inept fighters. As Randall Collins argues, ‘the amount of alcohol necessary to [overcome tension/fear] likely has a counter-balancing effect of making the fighters less competent’.Footnote 76 This helps to explain why almost no one was seriously injured or killed during the mutiny.
Alcohol's effect on the emotional tenor of the commander-soldier confrontation can be deconstructed into three parts, linking the biochemical to the cognitive/psychological to the cultural. First, alcohol, directly and par soi-même, engaged the subcortical affective programmes of fear and anger, providing the neurophysiological predicate of what followed. These raw emotions were channelled, communicated and given meaning in ways specific to the historical, social and cultural context of fighting on the Western Front. Alcohol produced anger and reduced fear, but contextual reference points indigenous to the 82nd BI pushed the mutineers towards one set of choices and behaviours as to how they should act out these basic emotions. Moreover, the cognitive effects of alcohol myopia also required reference to contextually situated objects, relationships, and goals. Pre-existing relationships between the men and their commanders determined that Bulot's neutral cues would be interpreted as hostile, that consequences of indiscipline would be ignored, and that mutineers would even agitate specifically for rest, leave and an end to the fighting in the first place.
Men who drink expect to feel the effects of drinking, and the men of the 82nd BI who drank probably did so with the specific intent of bringing about the neurophysiological, cognitive and group-psychological effects described above. I believe that these men made a conscious choice to use alcohol in order to change and control their emotional state for specific ends. In this sense, the intoxication of the men can be interpreted as an expression of individual and group agency. By using some tenets of basic emotions theory and neuroscience, I hope to have shown drinking was an integral part of a complex tactical system of emotional resistance.
Problems of application and method
It is impossible to verify empirically that the men involved in the mutiny were intoxicated at any given time or how intoxicated they might have been; Bulot had no breathalysers. We have only the officers’ reports to go on, so it is necessary to ask if the reports are reliable. It could be objected that the officers who described the mutineers as ‘drunken apaches’ may have been trying to explain away the mutiny by blaming it on drink. But five different officers produced mutually corroborating reports during different interviews as to the intoxication of the mutineers, and the reports differ enough from one another to effectively rule out collusion among their authors. Most importantly, the reports’ references to intoxication were descriptive, not prescriptive; not one officer actually argued that intoxication precipitated the mutiny. These officers had no reason to lie about a detail that had no relevance in their own aetiologies of indiscipline.
Moreover, the purported intoxication of the mutineers from the 82nd BI fits with a greater trend. The official French history of the war reported that the ‘great majority’ of mutineers were drunk.Footnote 77 Admittedly, the official history is notoriously unreliable, but the archival holdings relating to the mutinies contain hundreds, if not thousands, of references to alcohol consumption and intoxication. A statistical analysis of extant archival records suggests that alcohol consumption was a factor in between 78.8 and 84.8% of the mutinies.Footnote 78 All the major histories of the mutinies from Pedroncini to Loez describe alcohol consumption among mutineers.Footnote 79 Pétain considered alcohol consumption a primary cause of the mutinies and made controlling consumption the cornerstone of his reforms during the summer of 1917. Indeed, one of his first orders as commander-in-chief was to overhaul the alcohol distribution system in the army zones and make alcohol more difficult to purchase.Footnote 80 For all these reasons, it seems reasonable to accept the testimony of Mignot and others as to the intoxication of the mutineers. In any case, further research into the relationship between alcohol consumption and indiscipline would be enlightening.
It could be argued that the mutiny ended not because the troops sobered up, but because they got what they wanted from Mignot. This argument is unconvincing for three reasons. First, the violence on 1 June continued for six hours after Mignot acceded to the mutineers’ demands at 9.00 p.m., which is strong evidence that his promises did not bring about the end of the mutiny. Second, the brigade's officers told the protesting men clearly that their actions were in violation of the code de justice militaire and would be punished. Finally, it is hard to believe that the same men who attempted to murder their commanding General could honestly think that they would be rewarded with rest and leave. It is more likely that the passivity of the men after the mutiny was the result of penitence and fear.
Finally, there is the question of biological determinism. If French soldiers were constantly drinking, drinking always made men angry, and being angry made men mutinous, why wasn't every poilu from Péronne to Belfort constantly up in arms? This critique is off target for two reasons. First, archival sources show that the majority of individual and collective acts of indiscipline in the French army – both during and after the mutinies – did, indeed, involve intoxicated men. The army recognised the relationship between alcohol and indiscipline as early as winter 1914/15. From March 1915 onwards, it made strenuous efforts to regulate the amount that men drank and prevent, in Joffre's words, the ‘pernicious [effect of alcohol consumption] both from the point of view of discipline and that of the health of the men’.Footnote 81 The point is that if a poilu was up in arms and misbehaving, he was likely in his cups. The important historical question here – the one this article gets at – is under what circumstances the emotions of intoxicated individuals would be directed towards indiscipline.
Second, and more importantly, the charge of reductionism is premised upon an unsatisfying ‘all-or-nothing’, ‘either/or’ model of causality: either affective programmes explain everything or they explain nothing, and since they cannot explain everything without reducing everyone to automatons, they must explain nothing. This critique fundamentally misreads my argument, which is that the categorical theory of emotions can help provide partial answers as to why and how specific basic emotions influence specific decisions in specific cases. The emotional consequences of alcohol consumption in the 82nd BI can be considered the proximal cause of the mutiny, but only in light of other contextually bound, necessary antecedent causes that overlapped and augmented each other.
Conclusion
The central methodological intervention of this article has been that historians who investigate social protests might find some elements of basic emotions theory useful, and that the approach outlined could help untangle the causal threads of historically overdetermined events. Consider the historiography of the French army mutinies, in which the disagreements between the two leading schools – that of ‘consentement patriotique (consent)’ and that of ‘contrainte (constraint)’ – shape the entire field.Footnote 82 Those who support the consent model argue for the existence of ‘war culture’, a cultural superstructure that provides evidence of French soldiers’ (sometimes grudging) willingness to fight. Soldiers chose to do so out of deeply felt patriotism, an ideological commitment to French republicanism, and a hatred of the Germans. In this model, the mutinies provide an example of citizen-soldiers renegotiating to what kind of command authority they would consent.Footnote 83 Those who support the ‘constraint’ model argue for the existence of ‘peace culture’, a set of subtle but powerful anti-war norms and behaviours that underscore the unwillingness of the French to fight.Footnote 84 In this model, a militaristic and totalitarian social structure made protest or resistance to the war virtually impossible. The mutinies provide an example of Frenchmen seizing an opportunity to reject wholesale the authority of their commanders. The repression that followed is evidence of the coercive character of French militarism.Footnote 85
‘Consent’ and ‘constraint’ are both useful tools for analysing the cultural and social history of the war. But because they focus on large, anonymous, and disembodied forces, they can have trouble explaining micro-level events. Recently, some French historians have successfully used micro-sociological and ethnographical approaches to bridge ‘consent’ and ‘constraint’.Footnote 86 The approach of this article could further aid in the project of reconciling the two historiographies, at least in some small way, by showing how practices associated with ‘consent and ‘constraint’ were translated into, navigated as, and challenged by particular basic emotions. For instance, it could open up a conceptual middle ground, allowing for concepts like ‘consensual coercion’ and ‘coerced consent’. Two examples might clarify what I mean.
For an example of ‘consensual coercion’, consider that some soldiers chose to drink before attacks in order to steel their resolve. This phenomenon is highlighted in the following verse from the song ‘Ode au Pinard’, published in the trench journal Le 120 Court:
Oh wine that is brought up in the corvée,
To a soul that has been tested too much
Pushes it to rediscover, right away,
Masculine strength and courage
And if not strength, then rage!
I salute you, O Pinard!Footnote 87
The themes of the lines – wine soothes troubled souls, it ‘pushes’ men to feel manly emotions like ‘strength and courage’, and it works ‘immediately’ – are repeated in hundreds of other sources. This song and others like it portrayed the men who drank as doing so in order to manage their insupportable levels of fear, fatigue, and depression. Some poilus had trouble pushing themselves to fight, so they let the pinard do the pushing. In effect, they coerced their own affective programmes into providing the emotional experiences France required for her defence.
For ‘coerced consent’, consider that some soldiers were pressured or ordered to drink before attacks in order to heighten their aggressiveness. Gabriel Chevallier describes this in La Peur:
We drink eau-de-vie, sickly tasting like blood, burning in our stomachs like an acid. It is a hateful chloroform with which we anesthetise our minds, [one] that subdues the feelings of apprehension while we wait for the torture of our bodies, [becoming] living autopsies sliced open by iron shards.Footnote 88
Chevallier's men were objects, bodies and bundles of emotions to be controlled and manipulated. In this case, the army performed a neurophysiological intervention upon its citizen-soldiers and the alcohol ration could be interpreted as technology of social control. By using alcohol to produce feelings that encouraged men to do things they were hesitant or afraid to do when sober, the army imposed upon its men a disciplined set of emotional outlets and restraints. Perhaps men who ‘chose’ to fight only superficially did so because the inauthentic emotional community of the trench restricted their agency by predetermining what choices they would make.
‘Consensual coercion’ and ‘coerced consent’ are admittedly protean and under-theorised, but I think they provide some idea of how historical thinking informed by neuroscience could elucidate new or hidden avenues of agency and identify new or hidden types of social control. During social protests, basic emotions are simultaneously instrumental and instrumentalised, often in subtle ways. Therefore, we ought to at least think about how basic emotions can be generated, mobilised, and manipulated in the brain. But in order to do this, we must first have some understanding of the neuroscience of basic emotions theory.
