Women and the French Army during the World Wars, 1914–1940

By Andrew Orr

A history and analysis of how women worked for the French Army from 1914 to 1940.

How did women contribute to the French Army in the World Wars? Drawing on myriad sources, historian Andrew Orr examines the roles and value of the many French women who have been overlooked by historians—those who worked as civilians supporting the military. During the First World War, most officers expected that the end of the war would see a return to prewar conditions, so they tolerated women in supporting roles. But soon after the November 1918 armistice, the French Army fired more than half its female employees. Demobilization created unexpected administrative demands that led to the next rehiring of many women. The army’s female workforce grew slowly and unevenly until 1938 when preparations for war led to another hiring wave; however, officers resisted all efforts to allow women to enlist as soldiers and alternately opposed and ignored proposals to recognize them as long-term employees. Orr’s work offers a critical look at the indispensable wartime roles filled by women behind the lines.

“Orr has successfully made the leap into what we have needed for decades: a truly modern and mainstream study of the complex interplay of women and the military in modern society that also takes into account the complex interplay of race and class.” —American Historical Review

“Women and the French Army is well researched and provides an engaging read.” —Women in French Studies

“What is especially noteworthy about Orr’s book is not the gender history, however, but the military history. Orr’s research provides an excellent reminder that militaries are so much more than their front-facing services. In focusing on the civilian employees of the French army, Orr is able to tease out some of the nuances of this history that would otherwise be obscured.” —French History

“This is a fascinating study of intended and unintended consequences, well researched, well-written, and a pleasure to read.” —H-France Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253026781

Book preview

1

Weapons of Total War, 1914–1918

The First World War had a profound effect on the French Army and led to changes in how officers defined military identity and whom they accepted as being part of the military community. Those changes revered a long-term process of masculinizing the military community that originated with the French Revolution and accelerated during the early Third Republic. Just as the crisis of 1914 and the advent of modern total war during World War I forced French commanders to change their combat tactics and adapt their force structure, it also led them to change the army’s relationship to women. Unlike many other belligerent powers such as Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, France did not recruit women as soldiers or sailors. Instead, the French Army hired women as temporary civilian employees to take over rear-area functions and free men for combat duty.

These women were not recognized as soldiers, but they performed a wide variety of vital functions, and senior military leaders devoted a considerable amount of time and resources to recruiting them and debating their futures within the army. Their arrival in the military community was unexpected, and it challenged established assumptions that self-discipline was a uniquely male trait and the cornerstone of military professionalism. Many officers objected to women’s sudden return to the military community, but senior generals and most ministers of war strongly supported hiring women to deal with the army’s critical personnel shortage during the war. This pressure from the top led to the creation of a set of hiring preferences that favored the widows and orphans of fallen soldiers, but otherwise hiring was decentralized to allow officers to respond to changes in their workload quickly. Despite significant opposition to women being part of the military community, by the end of the war there were nearly 200,000 women working inside the French Army.

THE MASCULINIZATION OF THE ARMY

The fact that women as a group were not permitted to be warriors did not mean that they played no role in France’s many wars before 1914. As John Lynn has shown, women played important roles in early modern European armies as essential members of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mixed military-civilian campaign communities. When King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden led a campaign in Germany during the Thirty Years War, he had more civilians than soldiers in his forces.¹

Civilians were crucial to the period’s aggregate contract armies’ ability to feed and supply themselves. Merchants recognized a campaigning army as a lucrative market. The French Army tolerated the presence of regular merchants, but it also institutionalized specific civilians’ roles in providing soldiers with supplies. Some civilians worked for the army as sutlers, or vivandiers.²

Many of the sutlers were women (vivandières), and other women also followed the armies and worked as laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks. During the period of aggregate contract armies, the wives and children of the soldiers traveled and served with the forces. Indeed, soldiers’ sons were the French Army’s main source of voluntary recruits before the French Revolution. Although most enlisted men were single, and aristocratic officers almost never brought their wives or young children with them, French armies still contained thousands of civilians. Many wives and children added to the army’s labor pool, but they drained its supplies and slowed it down because it was effectively impossible for a commander to order his soldiers to abandon the slower-moving civilians or deny them a share of the army’s food when so many of them were from the soldiers’ families. While hampering an army’s mobility, women helped to feed the army through a combination of foraging, trading, and food preparation.³

As Thomas Cardoza has shown, in the late 1600s the French state began to officially license certain individual soldiers to be vivandiers. These soldiers continued to fulfill their normal military obligations, but had a special license to sell supplies to their comrades. In theory they were expected to run their businesses themselves, but in practice they could not fulfill their contracts without help because they also remained soldiers. Among other things, they could not leave camp or depart from the column, which meant it would have been almost impossible for them to procure new supplies while on campaign. As a result, vivandiers were always allowed to marry. Vivandiers’ wives were called vivandières and did most of the work, but the contracts technically belonged to their husbands. Because vivandières were not soldiers, they were permitted to depart from the army while it was campaigning to scavenge for extra food or to purchase alcohol and tobacco. Women’s ability to go places their husbands could not meant that they, and not their husbands who held the contacts, were the people actually providing the additional supplies the army needed and individual soldiers demanded. Some women even sold their wares, especially alcohol, to soldiers on the