1This article, whose overall subject matter came in part from a thesis on the contribution of French social sciences to the study of military issues, [2] proposes to shed light on some of their recurrent cognitive difficulties in understanding military topics, accepting them as fully legitimate subjects for research, and, above all, proposing an appropriate scientific process for this. The historical lack of interest by French sociologists in military issues is striking. Even though this is relative—for example, in relation to American output on the same theme, or French output on other topics—and has varied since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is very clear and was fully highlighted and commented on by those rare persons who regularly devoted themselves to its study: Raymond Aron, Gaston Bouthoul, Raoul Girardet, Bernard Boëne, to cite just a few of them. More recently, the historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, in a work entitled Combattre. Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne [To Fight: A Historical Anthropology of Modern War], questioned the strange silence of the social sciences on the subject of combat, despite many well-known sociologists, historians, and anthropologists having themselves carried arms and fought. The long absence, and then the small number of journals specializing in the study of war and/or armies, as well as their confidential nature, was another marker of this disinterest, to which we can add the small amount of teaching devoted to the subject in universities and at the Grandes Écoles. While still a student, I had my first experiences at university of the reactions that the desire to study such subjects generally provokes: surprise, as it was a totally incongruous choice, and suspicion, at best. While suspicion can easily be explained by ideological and moral reasons, the main source of the feeling of incongruity is found elsewhere. The French identification of classical sociology as the study of social cohesion, and the perception of war as the ultimate destruction of social cohesion, did not move in the right direction. [3] And when we recall that, for the founders of French sociology, social cohesion was not only the main subject of the discipline, but the justification for the social and political utility of sociology, we are able to better understand the reluctance to include the study of war, and, with this, that of armies, in the corpus of legitimate sociological themes. Since its emergence, French sociology, in contrast to German sociology—at least until the mid-twentieth century [4]—aimed to promote social consensus. However, Raymond Aron [5] was right to point out that the precursors of the nineteenth century judged that the study of war, peace, and armies came quite naturally under sociology. One could therefore assume that the more or less conscious identification of military phenomena with antisocial expressions developed in France at the same time as Durkheimian thought.

2However, as already mentioned, this lack of interest is relative, and paying attention to what the social sciences, despite everything, have produced in France on military issues between the time of their emergence (namely the beginning of the nineteenth century) and the middle of the twentieth century allows us, among other things, to highlight a tradition of understanding the subject that is not without contemporary consequences. The concerns of the exercise are internal to the sociological discipline, and more broadly to the social sciences, linked to the process of producing knowledge and evaluating it. They are both social and political, in a consistent and structural way, in that they refer to the conditions of sovereignty and the modes of defense of our country, or economic, in that they touch on what drives public life in political and security contexts that are somewhat strained. The subject is currently generating keen interest and sometimes fierce debates within a French contemporary society that is continually at war outside its borders and is regularly affected by terrorism. [6]

Specific and Non-Specific Approaches in the Military Field

9The idea by which war and armies have to be subject to a sociological analysis that is partly specific compared with the study of other forms of conflict—“social conflict”, for example—or to that of organizations, is certainly still a polemical idea. It remains the case that, for those seeking to develop the sociology of war and armies as specialized sociology, [9] this is a necessity. In fact, if the field covered by military themes is only an area of application of concepts and theories developed from a study of other research subjects, then there is no valid scientific reason justifying a specialized sociology. All the groups of researchers who, without considering this requirement, were involved, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the development of research programs and think tanks devoted to the study of military phenomena, finally ended up with a double scientific and institutional failure. [10]

10But what is a specific approach or treatment of the subject? [11] The use of the descriptive in fact has nothing to do with any military assumption of exceptionalism, an essentialized particularism of the subject. It refers, more prosaically, to the fact that a specialism within a discipline is scientifically justified by recognition of the relative alterity of its subject vis-à-vis subjects around which other areas of research specialization are formed. Family and work are two institutions, but these institutions have to be judged, from a certain angle, to be sufficiently specific, one compared against the other, so that a sociology of the family and a sociology of work can exist, separately. The relative alterity of areas of specialism is embodied, inter alia, in the partial originality of the methodological, conceptual, or theoretical understanding of subjects of research, the aim being to produce a scientific discourse that is adapted to their empirical characteristics. With these precautions taken, we come to elements that distinguish specific and non-specific approaches to military phenomena from the cognitive point of view.

11The first criterion of differentiation is the consideration or rejection of the political dimension of military issues. This does not have to be judged to be exclusive; a study can certainly be part of a specific treatment by emphasizing its social, economic, or cultural dimensions. On the other hand, non-specific analyses are all those based on theories which, overall, exclude political aspects of the existence of the military institution and the phenomenon of war, systematically send them to the margins, or consider that they are determined.

12Regarding the military institution, the theories concerned are those that conceal the fact that: 1) armies are a means of political action, whatever the identity of the beneficiary of this means; [12] 2) the use, at least potential, of violence results in a certain number of particularities in the institutional functioning of armies; 3) of all the possible functions fulfilled by the military institution, that which consists of embodying, defending, or promoting sovereignty cannot be removed. With regard to war, what is involved this time are sociological theories identifying the structural causes of the phenomenon, with the exclusive and mechanical influence of psychological, biological, social, economic, demographic, or cultural factors.

13The distinction between specific and non-specific approaches also goes through the cognitive divisions between objectivism and subjectivism on the one hand, and rationalism and irrationalism on the other. The complexity of the clarification of specific approaches, from this angle, comes from the fact that they propose a combination of four dimensions. If only two of these are expressed, then theoretical understanding is not fully adapted to the empirical characteristics of the subject. None of the pairs, subjectivism-rationalism, objectivism-irrationalism, subjectivism-irrationalism, or objectivism-rationalism, is capable of fully accounting for a military reality that is dependent, both on the objective structure of relations between collective entities (states, armies, parties, social groups, and so on), and on its subjective interpretation by individual and collective actors, on rationality and the potential irrationality of their motivations, representations, or behavior. In fact, one cannot theoretically exclude the study of war and, by extension, that of armies: the intention of instrumental rationality—the ends-means relationship—the practical necessity of axiological rationality and irrationality—motivations for combat: the sanctity attached to sovereignty and/or the “cause”, traditions, and affects—and, finally, the risk of absorbing rational elements by the uncontrolled development of irrationality—ideological conceptions of political leaders and/or military chiefs, collective passions and beliefs of the “masses” or opinion, and multiple affects of soldiers.

14It is therefore completely logical, depending on the historical realities taken as references, that relations between rationality and irrationality are organized empirically in a very varied way. For example, an analysis that concludes in the elimination, indeed the disappearance, in a given place and moment, of the instrumental rationality of war, [13] could be specific. In contrast, the same analysis will be put into a non-specific category if it a priori starts from the principle of the integral, universal, and timeless irrationality of the phenomenon of war.

15The final element in the differentiation of specific and non-specific treatments of military phenomena is the part of the contingency of the subject—more generally of the reality from which the subject is extracted—placing the many actors involved in a situation where their behavior is neither completely free (social, cultural orientations linked to education and experience, constraints arising from uncertainty, the “fog” of war and frictions), nor entirely determined by external causes (condition of the possibility of the development of a political, strategic, and tactical praxeology).

Politics

16Of the three constituent elements of specific approaches, the most problematic for French sociologists has been, and still is to a certain extent, the relationship between military issues and political issues—identifying the sociology of the war and armies with a branch of political sociology. It may even be reasonably considered that, when the approaches developed are equally non-specific, from the viewpoint of the other two criteria, this is mainly as a consequence of the refusal to define the subject as participating in a reality, where the political dimension is central.

17To avoid misunderstandings, I wanted to draw attention here to what a conception of war as a political phenomenon is not necessarily. First, as I have said, it is not necessarily an exclusively political theory. Next, neither is it necessarily a state theory of war. The reason for this is simple: politics and the state are two different things. The fact that contemporary wars are no longer predominantly the expression of interstate conflicts through conventional confrontation between regular armies takes away nothing of the political nature of the phenomenon. This always opposes groups of individuals who do not agree on the aims and methods of their relations, and who confront each other through the collective use of more or less organized armed violence. What is political is everything in the organization of a common existence, within a society or between societies, that becomes the subject of a lasting collective public conflict. [14] As for a modern state, this is just one of the forms that the political and administrative organization of a society can take, and it is a historical process. [15] There was politics before the state, and there is politics outside the state. Finally, a concept of war as a political phenomenon is not necessarily a rationalist concept of warlike action. Political meaning and rationality are not necessarily conflated.

18What fundamentally distinguishes the political understanding of war, irrespective of its many variants, is, first, the assertion by which this is a collective conflict where the concerns refer to the general organization of a common existence, and for the regulation of which armed violence is used. In other words, it is the idea that war cannot be reduced, neither to “conflict” alone—it is a particular kind of conflict—nor to “violence” alone—it is a particular form of violence: collective, tending to be organized and legitimized, in the eyes of those who fight, by the value of its proclaimed concerns. [16] Reducing the phenomenon of war, in an explicit or implicit way, through the intervention of theoretical tools used to account for, in the generic category of “conflict” or the very conceptually hazy “violence”, is the best starting point toward developing the non-specific.

19This is, then, the assertion of the at least relative autonomy of politics, understood as a general activity with its own and distinctive characteristics, which differentiates it from other collective phenomena.

20

The autonomy of politics, that which Raymond Aron did not cease to reaffirm in his work—in a dual meaning: autonomy compared with the economic and the moral—is not, however, an absolute autonomy. On the one hand, the principle of autonomy in the political sphere allows one to refuse Marxist reductionism—which ultimately reduces politics to the economic “infrastructure“—but not to prevent an explanation of political actions by the interaction of many social factors. On the other hand, this principle of autonomy implies that politics should be accepted and analyzed in itself, that it “cannot be reduced to morality“, outside the sphere of “good feelings“. [17]

The French Sociological Tradition and Military Issues

21Yet when we study the way in which the representatives of French social sciences included in the corpus have, since the emergence of the disciplines, understood war and armies, the most striking thing is their tenacity in rejecting the idea of military issues as political issues. If we focus on the dominant schools of thought of the French sociological tradition—so understood in a broad sense: encompassing, as Émile Durkheim would have wanted, all the social sciences—here, in their broad outlines, are the theories of military issues which succeeded each other at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Second World War.

In the Great War

43From 1915, the First World War was seen by French sociologists, doctors, and military practitioners as an event that could be exploited in order to extend and improve the knowledge of social sciences and psychology. A huge area of documentation and an unprecedented experience, an empirical consequence of the history of theories of war formulated since the beginning of the nineteenth century, conflict provided a unique opportunity for the different disciplines to review and deepen the knowledge produced until then.

44This opportunity was largely missed by professional sociologists who most often observed the Great War from afar, mainly concerned with foreseeing the overall social functioning of French post-war society, and with anticipating the continuities or the ruptures introduced into social life by a conflict that was seen as a digression and which, in any case, was not in itself a subject for scientific investigation: [31] the general subject of sociology remained that of “normal” social functioning, conflated with that of peacetime.

45Military practitioners or doctors and amateurs of nascent social psychology, having known life on the front, were the only ones to engage in an approach that tended toward scientificity. Spending time on the front had provided them with empirical experience and opportunities for observation, but also, through the intervention of the effects of perspective, encouraged them to consider the phenomenon of war at more limited levels, and to prefer a sociological discourse that moved the development of more technical analyses toward social philosophy, connecting the contributions of sociology and psychology. [32]

46Finally, some academics participated in the national propaganda initiative, which began almost at the start of the war, even though the vast majority of the first publications only appeared in 1915. For internal use, and aimed at soldiers, as at those behind the lines, or aimed at public opinion in neutral countries, these publications met an invariable general objective: legitimizing the country’s entry into war in relation to the values claimed by republican France. While many experts, led by the French state, deliberately did the work of the propagandists—Émile Durkheim for example [33]—others strengthened the “morale” of their compatriots in an isolated way, sometimes without really realizing it, in the perpetuation of academic work that, well before the First World War broke out, was already extremely steeped in patriotic and national considerations. These latter experts ran the risk of becoming confused and, while believing that they were studying the war, were in fact being above all “shaped” by it. [34]

47While nationalist warmongering tended to subsume the ideological divisions in society, the investment of French academics in the propaganda of war generally took place in a mixture of patriotic fervor and scientific certainties, namely in the unconsciousness or concealment of its partisan—therefore political—nature. The fight against Germany was that of “Humanity”, of “Civilization”, of “History”, of “Peace”, almost never of “France”. Experienced academics lived the war from afar, bringing up the clichés of propaganda or more concerned with knowing which theory on the evolution of democratic and industrial societies was the reason for the return to peace that this major event was in the process of bringing about—with a few exceptions. The youngest, the intellectual future of the country, died in the war or returned deeply scarred.

48Thus, the Great War was probably one of the most significant contemporary reasons for the divorce between the French academic world and the army. While the influence of the Dreyfus affair is systematically mentioned as a factor in academic antimilitarism, it is very strange that the massacre of the First World War was just as systematically forgotten. And it is very probable that the omission of the influence of the first global conflict on the relationship of the academic world with the subjects of scientific investigation that are war and armies was only the extension of the silence of the great names in social sciences who, in the twentieth century, experienced modern war. Highlighted by the historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, [35] the silence on their wartime experience of sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, whose role in the development of the social sciences in the twentieth century was central, is no doubt related to two major reasons. The first is not at all specific to academics: ex-soldiers, generally, do not talk much about what they’ve experienced. Conversely, the few who do talk often do not seem capable of letting go of the subject, which they approach directly or indirectly—for example Alain (Mars ou la guerre jugée) and Jean Norton Cru (Du témoignage). The inability to communicate a wartime experience defying the rules and norms of “normal” times was all the more intense since after the great bloodshed, societies were motivated by the desire to forget. It was expressed either by silence, or by an obsession with talking—but in this case, the words and the mind seemed as if they were “blocked”, halted on the event. The second reason relates to the judgment that the academics made a posteriori on their attitude, as citizens and experts, during the period preceding their discovery of modern war. The account by Jean Norton Cru is invaluable here, as are the thoughts of Alain on the military aesthetic—the philosopher, the central figure of French pacifism, exerted a considerable influence on young philosophers educated between the wars. Culture did not stand in the way of wartime romanticism as easily as might be imagined. On the contrary, it could reveal a formidable effectiveness in the struggle, valorizing and exalting common passions. There was, perhaps, in the silence of academics who were former soldiers, a measure of shame and guilt to have been united, without being aware of the consequences, in the collective enthusiasm marking the beginning of the Great War. And the fact is that the lack of evidence cannot be accepted as proving that this did not have any effect on the thinking of French social science experts. Silence is a refusal. The pacifist tradition of the École normale supérieure dates from the sacrifice of a generation of brilliant young minds. Marcel Mauss, heir to the founder of French sociology, refuted everything that could, in the opinion of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, contribute to supporting the nationalism of the Third Republic. Marc Bloch ended up admitting that the collective “fatigue” after the First World War was the major reason for the liberals’ poor fighting spirit in the 1930s.

Law against Politics

49It was not always a political understanding of war that led to the extreme desire for peace in the 1920s—which again turned society away from an army that found it difficult to return to isolation and social denigration. After having been denied by the development of industrial and democratic society, biological laws, and war propaganda that dissolved nationalism in universalism, politics, still incriminated as a warmonger and assumed to be expendable, was now fought, especially by the law.

50Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period from 1920 to 1945 had the lowest number of titles in the corpus—29. Of course, objectively, the era was not so lacking in output, but it is unlikely that this “lean period” was only the result of a corpus built on the basis of the subjectivity of actors in the thematic area. Although later authors very rarely quote works or articles dating from the period—apart from a few very well-known works, such as those written by Charles de Gaulle or Marc Bloch—there is no doubt that the output of the time, while not being as meager as all that, underwent a real deflation. Against this backdrop, the legal discipline stood out as the only one at the time that provided a consistent and coherent output, which later authors recall. And there is, perhaps, a link between these two main aspects of the corpus during the period.

51For the first time we must therefore try to understand the eradication of the French scientific effort aimed toward analyzing the subject. The motives and explanatory factors were not identical for the whole of the period. The silence during the period 1940-45 may easily be explained by the fate that the Vichy regime reserved for academics who were, at best, deprived of their professional independence and, more broadly, for intellectuals subjected to the ideological rigors of the time. As for those fighting the regime and the Nazi invader, from inside or outside metropolitan France, they had, essentially, other fish to fry [36]. What was important was thus reduced to understanding the eradication, between 1919 and 1939, of an orientation in French scientific investigations that the international, political, economic, and intellectual situation, the collective desire for “revenge”, and the Great War, had encouraged in another way.

52France is victorious, it was proclaimed during the two years following the end of the war. Once the euphoria had passed, the extent of the victory was revealed in bitterness: 1,350,000 dead, 3,220,000 injured, hundreds of thousands of disabled, 3,000,000 children not born (age groups depleted by low birth rate); twelve departments devastated, including the monumental heritage; 30% of the national wealth and half the gold reserves gone; and transport equipment and the tools of factories worn out or destroyed by fighting and the retreating German army. The shock caused by the realization of the human and material damage did not resonate in the same way in all minds. To simplify, one can say that the socialists, liberals, and radical republicans gave an apocalyptic significance to the First World War. This was the final gigantic struggle of the united forces of good against evil: the new world that would emerge from the end of the encounter would no longer be nourished by the blood of the people.

53

Paradoxically, the very watchwords of the antimilitarist ideology had been taken up by the war propaganda: fighting against the Germany of Wilhelm II, for some, this was fighting the very spirit of “militarism“, “waging war on war“, fighting for the universal advent of pacifist humanitarianism. [37]

54For monarchists, all supporters of an authoritarian political order, and conservative republicans, the core issues of the war were the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine and the international standing of France. One regularly cited historian was in the habit of saying, almost in these terms and while joking, that in the Great War, half of French people believed they were at the Battle of Poitiers—which took place in the year 732—and the other half at the Battle of Valmy during the Revolution, but they didn’t realize this because the enemy’s appearance was the same. One can, no doubt, discuss the proportions, the simple division into two groups, the degree of awareness, and the formalization of these historical and ideological references by individuals. The misunderstanding is, however, undeniable and echoes the divisions in French society from 1890—partisan divisions from a common agreement outside the military sphere, after the defeat of 1870, covered by the banner of the Union Sacrée [political truce] of 1914, and which reappeared intact at the end of the war:

55

At the ideological level in particular it is, in fact—in almost the same words—the same debate conducted since the middle of the nineteenth century around the military institution which started again after 1919 and continued until the eve of the Second World War. [38]

56The 1914-18 war was therefore understood by some as ending a historical era and opening a new one, and by others as an important moment in the evolution of France in its historical “path” and “role”, in the route of its destiny. Yet, it was finally the failure of these two visions of France which led to the Great War: it was not the great historical rupture hoped for by some; for others it marked the beginning of a backward development. The myth of the endless advance of civilization, which had aroused and caused so many hopes to flourish in the nineteenth century, never really recovered from the terrible ordeal. Nor did the idea of national grandeur, where, in particular, thoughts on the demographic decline and France’s industrial backwardness highlighted the feeling of decline increasingly clearly. Certainly, after the war France appeared to be the great European power and, at the technical level, this was true. Hélie de Saint-Marc recalls:

57

The well-established society of my youth, with its institutions, its public figures, its army, the most powerful in the world, its government, suddenly collapsed in 1940 like a house of cards. [39]

58This is perhaps why, at the level of collective representations and their moral foundations, things were much more complex and ambiguous. Science and the machine, theoretically serving Man’s emancipation, became the queens of successive slaughter; democracy was not able to protect its children from massacre. France, which wanted, through war, to prove its supremacy in Europe, when defining the conditions for peace, had to compromise with the Anglo-Saxons, who did not want to weaken Germany too much, economically and financially; as mentioned, the concerns highlighted the subject of its demographic and industrial vitality.

59Even today, in human and social sciences, we do not have a rigorous conceptual tool that allows us to account for the phenomena of “collective trauma”. However, it was indeed something of this kind, but which is extremely difficult to define, that seemed to strike the different components of French society at the end of the 1914-18 war. [40] Apart from its military, political, industrial, bureaucratic, and intellectual causes, the defeat of 1940 did undeniably have a dimension of incongruity expressed by the intuition of Marc Bloch that French morality—for him the “collective conscience”, for us a composite result—was affected before 1939 by an evil that was unclear but real. The hypothesis of underground cracks caused by the Great War in the different collective representations of the historical sense of the French future was also part of the research perspectives opened up by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker.

60

The historiography of the First World War over the last eighty years has ignored the long furrow of suffering trailed in its wake by the great conflict. Let us be clear: the mass killings were—not without difficulty, moreover—in effect recorded. What was not, in contrast, was the loss. What was not, was the bereavement. Everything happened, in fact, as if the announcement of the numbers of dead, their breakdown by categories of age, by year, by type of unit, acted as a record of the extent of the disaster. This was included as a priority in a demographic register, and not in that, just as important, of collective suffering. [.. . ] In this respect, the problem goes beyond the history of the conflict itself. It is the history of the relationship of those in the West to war, to death in war, and perhaps to death in general, which is at stake here. It is, then, a whole part of the universe of representations within which we still move today that is in question. [41]

61In this context, the development of legal engineering dedicated to peace, at least until the 1930s, was perfectly understandable. This engineering was occupied with setting the philosophical foundations and reflecting on the smooth functioning of the institutions of a new international law, assimilated into a social law simultaneously with a state law: a “law of the people” coming from the “universal society”. All conflicts are judged as subject to regulation by legal means: it is enough to limit the state’s sovereignty legally.

62Many French lawyers, having participated in the League of Nations’ endeavor and the development of an international law distinct from state law, sought in Durkheimian sociology something to support the idea of the existence of an international society as an organic whole, in order to negate the classic distinction between the mechanisms of the internal regulation of societies and the mechanisms of the regulation of relations between collective entities in the international milieu, the specificity of which is the legitimacy of resorting to violence. [42] One finds, even among these, a few sociologist-lawyers, such as, for example, Georges Gurvitch.

63According to the optimistic ideas that presided over its birth, the League of Nations’ role was to ensure the enactment of international treaties and to resolve disagreements between nations peacefully and democratically. However, the new organization did not have any coercive means allowing it to enforce its decisions. This in no way discouraged the French lawyers, who worked toward promoting the new international law.

64With the occurrence of “escalating dangers”, a few minds tried to shake up the prevailing torpor, the belief in a “collective security”, based on an incantatory international law, the sterile dogmatism of “relentless defense”, advocated both by the political authorities and by military officers, after the deadly excesses of “the relentless attack” of the first years of the Great War. But France obtained compensation for the insult of 1870, it recovered Alsace-Lorraine, and was the leading power in the continent of Europe. Henceforth it was a power of the status quo, dominated by a pacifism that went beyond the social milieux which, until then, had traditionally conveyed this.

65* * *

66While social Darwinism only had an extremely marginal influence on French sociology, as it was reconstructed after 1945, the imprint of the other schools of thought mentioned remained very strong on contemporary sociology, even if, from the 1960s, a small milieu that specialized in the study of military phenomena was created in France, favoring specific approaches. Whatever the intellectual resources that were mobilized and their ideological background, the schools of thought that dominated the French sociological tradition finally shared the refusal to think about their subject. It was not the war and armies that were the material for study and reflection, but the conditions of their disappearance. And yet, to say that for permanent peace to reign politics must be replaced by the market, by the realization of a divided society, by the administration—today the famous “governance” and management—or again by the law, was paradoxically to admit that war and politics were inseparable. Contrary to the beliefs of the majority of authors who shaped it, the real element of debate that emerged from the tradition of French social sciences was not, then, of knowing whether war was a political phenomenon or not, but of knowing whether, on the one hand, it was possible to envisage the disappearance of politics and whether, on the other hand, the struggle against politics was the historical “mission” of sociology and, more broadly, of social sciences.