Much of human experience is the fighting of wars.  More of it is preparing for war.  French Republic’s Fighting Men: 1880-1914 is the story of France’s recovery from the Franco-Prussian War and its preparation for the next one.  This brief work is divided into three chapters; The Officers, The Soldiers and the French Foreign Legion.  Its text is liberally supplemented by charts and tables that express the numbers, and photos that present visual images to the readers. 

An army reflects the population from which it is drawn.  The Nineteenth Century had been a turbulent one for the French nation and Army. Governed by two Empires, a republic and two royal houses and rocked by the Dreyfus Affair, it struggled to maintain its balance in a changing country.  Political drift to the anti-officer and anti-clerical left made the Army less attractive to Catholic aristocrats, a fact demonstrated by the decline in noble-sounding names among officers and applications to military academies during the period studied. 

Interesting facts are revealed in the chapter on soldiers. Contrary to what Americans might think, that the French Army is and speaks French, these pages tell a different story.  It presents an ethnic blend of Celts, Languedoc/Midi from the Mediterranean coastal lands, Bretons of Britany and Normans of Normandy from continental France as well as North African and Senegalese troops.  Each group brought its own traits and dialects into military service.  Seemingly counterintuitive is the table on weight and height limits.  In an era in which physical strength was even more valuable than today, many men I know would be too tall for some or all categories, and most, even the young and lean, exceed the maximum weights. 

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War drove adoption of Prussian style military practices, including introduction of a drat law and rising proportions of “Rankers”, enlisted men promoted to the officer corps. 

The segment I found most interesting is the one on the French Foreign Legion.  Though the moniker is widely known, many details are filled in by this book.  Organized into battalions from different European countries and polyglot units, it was the force that projected France’s might across the globe, seeing action in the Crimean War, Algeria, Italy, Mexico (in support of Emperor Maximillian), Cameroon, and Sudan, before being drawn into defense against the Prussian invasion and suppression of the Paris Commune, all before 1880.  Thereafter, it was expanded to undertake deployments to North Africa, Vietnam, Dahomey and Madagascar, making it a battle-hardened force when summoned to France in 1914. 

Author Wendell Schollander has crafted an interesting and informative tome of transforming times and small, but consistent, warfare.  War History Network members will appreciate its intertwining of swirling currents in French civil and military life in the period between two cataclysmic wars for France.