The Scapegoat: The Two Lectures by Colonel Louis de Grandmaison, Delivered to the French General Staff in February 1911

This paper was first presented in 2006.  Seventeen years later, it has been revised and refreshed, incorporating the sum of my research and experience as a specialist in the development of the French Army.

Grandmaison’s lectures, and their subsequent publication, have been blamed for the Cult of Offensive à Outrance that gripped the French officer corps and particularly the ‘Young Turks’ who were impatient for reform. In the 1960s the former Chichele Chair of Military History at Oxford University, Professor Cyril Falls, in his history of the Great War chose to single out Grandmaison as the sole author of a ‘disastrous doctrine’ that directly led to the French defeats and horrendous casualties during the Battles of the Frontiers. Cyril Falls’ caricature of Colonel Grandmaison – ‘raving Colonel de Grandmaison’, ‘Peter the Hermit with flaming eyes, preach[ing] the new crusade’, ‘high-minded and selfless but crack-brained seer’ – has stuck in the public mind. It is not a correct interpretation. Furthermore, few people seem to have actually read Grandmaison’s original text.

The paper lays out what Grandmaison wrote, analyses his true intent and places his work in the proper context of French pre-war doctrinal debate and development. The new, final, section proposes a controversial interpretation, that Grandmaison’s empirical analysis of the deficiencies of the French pre-war army led him to conclusions that would become mainstream thinking after the Second World War. My original conclusion remains unchanged – that Grandmaison was made the official scapegoat for French deficiencies, primarily because he had died in action and could not defend himself.

Dr Simon House received his doctorate in War Studies in 2012. The research was subsequently published as Lost Opportunity: The Battle of the Ardennes, 22 August 1914 (Helion, 2016). He is currently writing a new study of the battle of the Frontiers, August 1914.

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