Les fusillés de la Grande Guerre sont-ils morts au nom de leurs idées pacifistes ?. Une approche quantitative

This article explores the issue of the executions of French soldiers during the Great War from a quantitative perspective. Using the Ministry of Defense?s database of the ?Fusillés de la Première Guerre mondiale?, we first describe the characteristics of these soldiers who were sentenced to death by a council of war or summarily executed, and examine whether the profile of the executed changed over the war years. This statistical portrait is then completed by two analyses conducted with the help of regression models. The first focuses on the temporal distribution of executions. In particular, we seek to determine whether variations in the number of executions from one month to the next are related to variations in the intensity of the fighting. The second analysis seeks to explain differences between French départements in the proportion of soldiers executed. Two main findings emerge from our study. First, the profile of the soldiers shot in 1914 was quite different from that of the soldiers who were executed in the following years: they were more often farmers, serving in the infantry, with no criminal record. On the other hand, the soldiers shot in 1917, a year of mutinies, did not differ much in their characteristics from those shot in 1916. Second, the results of our regressions suggest that the vast majority of the executed soldiers were "poilus" [?grunts?] like others who found themselves facing a firing squad for having committed a fault in a moment of weakness, often after having taken part in particularly violent fighting. Their actions were probably, in most cases, motivated more by the instinct of survival than by pacifist ideas or other political considerations. JEL codes: N44, K14, K42, D74