Category: Saint-Cyr

The Pulitzer Prize winner, Barbara W. Tuchman, holds some responsibility for encouraging two enduring myths of ‘La Grande Guerre’.

In a footnote to her 1962 book The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s wrote that ‘In the chapel of St. Cyr (before it was destroyed during World War II) the memorial tablet to the dead of the Great War bore only a single entry for “the Class of 1914”’.

Useful ammunition in support of a portrayal of ‘the French Army and the Futility of War’, this claim, like her statement that ‘Officers from St. Cyr went into battle wearing whiteplumed [sic] shakos and white gloves’ makes for great reading, but is somewhat lacking in terms of supporting evidence.

As the foremost French military academy, L’École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr was created by order of Napoléon Bonaparte on 1 May 1802. The school, originally at the château de Fontainebleau, received its first pupils in 1803.

Since 1829, each year the class (‘promotion‘) chooses a name for itself. Typically, these are battles, famous graduates of the school, slogans or nicknames. In January 1915, the 1913-14 promotion was named ‘la Grande Revanche’ – in keeping with the nation’s chief goal in 1914: revenge for the defeat in War of 1870.

According to research published by Général de brigade Jean Boÿ in 2010, a total of 781 (subsequently revised to 765) students were members of the class and he quotes figures from Colonel Jean Le Boulicaut, le Livre d’or des Saint-Cyriens morts au Champ d’honneur (Ed. la Saint-Cyrienne, 1990) that give 463 members as « morts au Champ d’honneur » (quite a particular expression, rather than the ‘official’ « morts pour la France » or « morts en service »). Of these 463, 406 died during la Grande Guerre or as a result of wounds they suffered in it. The others died or were killed in conflicts from Mesopotamia in 1920 through Syria in 1924, the Second World War (24 deaths) and on to Algeria (2). Surprisingly, 20 are known to have died but not where or when.

So, not all were killed (although a high percentage (53%) – high even to an experienced historian of the Great War – were). A few did die in 1914 – those who couldn’t wait to get into the fighting – but the great majority of the students were engaged as infantry, and grouped together at the end of August 1914 in « pelotons spéciaux régionaux » where they received basic training as chef de section. On 5 December 1914, those passing the final exam became temporary second lieutenants; their less successful comrades left as non-commissioned officers.

The life stories of these men are as varied as every person’s during the war. The worst year for casualties was 1915 when 223 were killed, but there were significant numbers who died in the other years of the war as well. Here’s just one example of a Saint-Cyrien who made it to 1918 but was killed in June during The Battle of the Matz: Jean Eugène Marie René ARTHAUD de La FERRIÈRE. Engagé volontaire le 17/08/1914, Lieutenant à la 9ème Compagnie du 151ème Régiment d’infanterie. (If you use Twitter, please consider following @Indre1418 – one of several accounts specialising in the service history of men from a particular commune, ville or département).

I still need to find a photograph of the memorial in the chapel as it stood before 1940 (can you help?). It’s true that the “vieux bahut” (old school) was indeed badly damaged by Allied bombing during the campaign to liberate France. It would be good to confirm just what the memorial did say.

And the white gloves and plumes? This seems to be a myth of a longer pedigree. On 15 April 1940, as a combined British and French force struggled to resist the German invasion of Norway , Life magazine published a short photo-article ‘The Best Blood of France. Graduates from St. Cyr’. With recently-released images of some of France’s ‘glorious dead’, the article compared the graduates of the 1940 ‘promotion‘ – Amitié Franco-Britannique (‘Franco-British Friendship’) – with the graduating class of 1914 who ‘swore to die in white gloves and plumes and promptly did, at Charleroi, on August 22, 1914.’ Their 1940 counterparts, Life‘s readers were told, were ‘equally willing to die’ (but this time in khaki, not white gloves) and the magazine grimly speculated based on the evidence of the previous war that not half of them would return…