Did the Executions of French Soldiers during the Great War Reflect Their Pacifist Views?

This paper explores the issue of the executions of French soldiers during the WW1 in a quantitative perspective. The database of French Ministry of Defense “Shot in the First World War†is exploited here for the first time to provide a complete description of the statistical portrait of the soldiers who were sentenced to death by a council of war or summarily executed. This database provides individual characteristics (skills, occupations), military variables (corps, rank) to which we have added contextual variables related to living conditions, weather conditions, illiteracy rates, dummies for regional language, county’s level of alcohol consumption, county’s voters abstention rate. Specifically, we investigate whether the variations in the number of executions over time were related to the intensity of engagements or to pacifist motives or other political considerations, as suggested in the literature. Two main findings emerge from our research: conversely to conventional wisdom, the soldiers executed in 1917, the year of the mutinies, did not differ from the rest of the sample. If statistical differences exist between years, the difference refers to 1914, not 1917. Our analysis leads to nuance the pacifist explanation. We give evidence that the conditions of survival on the front and the intensity of fights were the two main drivers of executions.