Neither lenient nor draconian: The evolution of French military justice during the early Third Republic

This dissertation is a history of the development of French military justice with special emphasis on France's first comprehensive military justice code, that of 1857. This code from the Second Empire provided the means for the army to court-martial soldiers on military and common law charges through tribunals called conseils de guerre (CGs). The dissertation seeks to understand how military justice operated during the early Third Republic (to the end of World War I), and how this period marked a critical turning point that, after the First World War, would see the increasing civilianization of military justice. The dissertation does not focus on the famous Dreyfus Affair---a special political and anti-Semitic case that has stained military justice's reputation---but on the more normal cases that appeared before CGs at the end of the nineteenth century.;The dissertation accomplishes this through an examination of the history of military justice in France, then a two-pronged approach of a quantitative analysis of approximately fourteen hundred CG cases and a qualitative analysis of three cases ranging in seriousness from a failure to report to a murder. The quantitative side compares the results of cases from the Paris CG with those from the Algiers CG and, for one year, civilian cases in the Paris Assize Court. In addition, the qualitative analysis examines how military and civilian justice systems investigated and tried two capital cases. The dissertation concludes that, although military justice during this period was concerned with the army's ability to retain its exceptional legal jurisdiction over its personnel for military and common law offenses, the military's peacetime procedure had much in common with its civilian counterpart and, despite some drawbacks, served the country well. However, critiques of the system prior to the Great War, and the system's inability to provide for proper justice during that same conflict led to sweeping changes that have largely civilianized and improved the military justice system, thereby helping France prepare for its transition, like that of other Western countries, to an all-volunteer force.