"A Furious, Unchained Mob": Alcohol and the Mutiny of the 82nd Brigade of Infantry, June 1–3, 1917

My paper is about the mutiny in the French 82^nd Brigade of Infantry (BI 82) in early June 1917. The paper takes a take a strong revisionist and intentionally controversial stance on the cause and meaning of the mutiny of the 82^nd BI. It argues that the mutiny is best understood as a response to excessive alcohol consumption and therefore should be analyzed with the tools of “neurohistory” and affect theory.

            The main argument of the paper is straightforward: excessive alcohol consumption among French soldiers was both necessary and sufficient for mutinous behavior in the BI 82. The paper uses archival materials from the service historique de l’armée de terre (SHAT, the French military archives) to reconstruct the events of the mutiny. The mutiny itself was extremely violent. The drunken mutineers—who numbered about two thousand—sacked a local village, attacked most of their commanders, and even attempted to decapitate their brigadier general in the town square. Using current, neurochemical models of human behavior, the paper argues that mutinies were in fact by the neuromodulation of the RAGE system by excessive alcohol consumption. Highly contingent, local factors combined with excessive alcohol consumption to push soldiers across what Randall Collins has called the “fear/tension” barrier and into a “forward panic.” This argument is a direct challenged to the received knowledge that distal casual factors such as frustration with the failed Nivelle Offensive, battle fatigue, or a general desire for the war to end caused the mutinies. The paper’s use of neurochemistry helps to resolve some of the thorniest questions in the historiography of the mutinies, such as why the mutinies were so short, why mutineers surrendered en masse, and why some groups mutinied and others didn’t. It also provides a new answer the question about what the mutinies were “really” about: basic chemistry.