Franc Tireur - World War I

World War I

The experiences of French guerrilla attacks and of the asymmetric warfare during the Franco-Prussian War had a profound effect on the German General Staff. During World War I, they carried out an unusually harsh and severe occupation of areas which they conquered. Hostages were regularly executed in response to reports of sniping in French and Belgian communities. The occupying German forces were reportedly very fearful of spontaneous civil resistance, which led to these arrests and executions.

After the war, General Erich Ludendorff, Germany's chief military strategist and its commander-in-chief on the Western Front at the end of the war, tried to defend German behavior in his memoir published in 1919, the two-volume Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914–1918. It was published that same year in London by Hutchinson as My War Memories, 1914–1918 and in New York by Harper as Ludendorff's Own Story, August 1914–November 1918.

In an article in the September 13, 1919 issue of Illustrated London News, the writer G. K. Chesterton responded to Ludendorff's book by remarking:

It is astounding how clumsy Prussians are at this sort of thing. Ludendorff cannot be a fool, at any rate, at his own trade; for his military measures were often very effective. But without being a fool when he effects his measures, he becomes a most lurid and lamentable fool when he justifies them. For in fact he could not have chosen a more unfortunate example. A franc-tireur is emphatically not a person whose warfare is bound to disgust any soldier. He is emphatically not a type about which a general soldierly spirit feels any bitterness. He is not a perfidious or barbarous or fantastically fiendish foe. On the contrary, a "franc-tireur" is generally a man for whom any generous soldier would be sorry, as he would for an honourable prisoner of war. What is a "franc-tireur"? A "franc-tireur" is a free man, who fights to defend his own farm or family against foreign aggressors, but who does not happen to possess certain badges and articles of clothing catalogued by Prussia in 1870. In other words, a "franc-tireur" is you or I or any other healthy man who found himself, when attacked, in accidental possession of a gun or pistol, and not in accidental possession of a particular cap or a particular pair of trousers. The distinction is not a moral distinction at all, but a crude and recent official distinction made by the militarism of Potsdam.