In 1917, after three years of a deadly and indecisive war of which no one saw the end, weariness affected all the European armies whose morale was at its lowest.
Inside the French troops, the bloody failure of the Nivelle offensive on the Chemin des Dames in the spring of 17, the appalling living conditions in the cold, the mud, the deluge of shells and the postponement of leave, all these factors added up, causing growing discontent among the men at the front.
Mutinies arose that the replacement of General Nivelle by Philippe Pétain did not slow down. These mutinies which continued to develop throughout the summer of 1917 affected, in a more or less lively dispute, nearly 2/3 of the French regiments. Similar movements were developing at the same time among the other European armies involved in the conflict, including inside the German army.
In the French army, mutinies mainly manifested themselves in the collective refusal of several regiments to line up. The soldiers agreed to keep the positions, but stubbornly refused to participate in new attacks that were doomed to failure or only allowed to gain a few hundred meters of ground on the adversary. These refusals to obey were accompanied by noisy demonstrations, rarely violent, during which the soldiers expressed their grievances and shouted multiple slogans, the most common of which is "Down with the war".
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the International certainly played a role in this great crisis of indiscipline, but it seems to us that it should be considered incidental because the main reason is indeed to be found in the refusal to participate in repeated attacks , suicidal and useless, whose regiments often emerged entirely decimated.
Philippe Pétain, the new general in chief of the armies, will manage to calm these rebellions by adopting a less offensive strategy than his predecessor in order to limit the losses in men. He also took several measures aimed at improving the fate of the soldiers, concerning among other things cantonments, food, rounds of permission... It should be noted, however, that the peak of intensity of the mutinies is between May 20 and on June 10, i.e. after the appointment of Pétain (May 15, 1917). We can therefore only say that this "put an end" to the mutinies.
This great crisis within the French army naturally brought its share of sanctions against the mutineers. About 3,500 convictions, in connection with these mutinies, were pronounced by the councils of war with a scale of more or less heavy penalties. Among other things, there were 1,381 sentences to hard labor or long prison terms and 554 death sentences, of which around fifty were effective (approximate figure. The figure would be between 60 and 70 according to the historian Guy Pedroncini). These figures have recently been revised downwards:according to historian D. Rolland there were about 30 executions. This number has always been a subject of controversy because of the impossibility of free access to the archives before 100 years. It also varies according to the period chosen for the mutinies, the date of the trials, some mutineers do not go to trial until 1918 and some trials of 1917 relate to events of previous years. In addition, it is estimated that 10 to 15% of military archives are permanently lost. Be that as it may, the number of executions in 1917, often put forward when speaking of those shot for example, remains relatively low compared to the number of people shot in the last months of 1914 (nearly 200) or the year 1915 (about 260).
On the English side, a mutiny which lasted a few days in the Étaples camp on the French coast of Pas-de-Calais, was very harshly repressed in 1917. This camp accommodated up to 80,000 English and Commonwealth soldiers to prepare them for the rigors of the front. The English and French armies will agree to keep the affair secret until 2017, when the English archives should be opened.
The hierarchy's handling of mutinies (soldiers degraded, shot, sent to certain death in impossible assaults, etc.) contributed to the psychological after-effects of this war.